The revitalized Warzone hit a speed bump this week when Season 1 Reloaded launched and was instantly plagued by game-breaking bugs. To their credit, the developers quickly addressed the issues in less than a day. I wrote yesterday how the devs should explain to the community what happened in a bid to be more transparent. And last night, they did just that.
In an X/Twitter post, Raven Software wrote:
“We wanted to address the issues that players encountered during the Season 1 Reloaded launch period.
We’ve been laying the groundwork for the return of some fan favorite features in upcoming seasons, which has required a degree of preemptive setup in our live environment.
Yesterday’s update shipped with some of that work, and we unfortunately encountered a conflict between live player data and our servers. Our teams were made immediately aware of the issues and began investigating shortly after the update went live. We rallied studio teams from around the world to get these issues resolved as swiftly as possible.
We – as devs – love this game and apologize for the disruption that resulted from these events. Please know that we hold ourselves to a high standard and yesterday’s issues did not align with that.
With that said, we’re also very excited for what’s ahead and look forward to bringing the best we can to #Warzone!”
That does help explain why those bugs weren’t present before the update hit live servers. Maybe implementing a test server to briefly test changes could help avoid issues like this in the future. It was a rough first day for fans and the dev team, but communication like this can earn a lot of goodwill from the community. The communication from the Warzone team is night and day different than what we saw last year.
Raven Software even turned the explanation into a marketing win, following it up with a teaser image of Rebirth Island and a Specialist Perk Package leaning on the map’s large tower.
Today, most of those bugs seen earlier in the week have been addressed, along with the return of the Champion’s Quest nuke contract. Players are already getting the nuke and taking out Warzone lobbies.
We still don’t have a concrete release date on when Rebirth Island will return to Warzone besides an ‘early 2024’ release date. The earliest would likely be the start of Season 2 on February 7 (based on the end time for the current battle pass).