Maybe Don't Play Call Of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War On Your Series X Just Yet
If you've been looking forward to playing Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War on your Xbox Series X, you may want to wait just a bit. The new Activision game, which came out on Nov. 13 to take advantage of the next-generation capabilities of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, has been experiencing issues. With the new Series X, those issues have translated to some consoles getting bricked.
On a Reddit thread, user Junesfoshiz said that his copy of the game would continually crash his new Xbox, but rebooting worked just fine — until it finally crashed and stopped working completely. Others have chimed in with similar stories, and some are waiting on new Xboxes to arrive to replace the bricked ones, which appear to be unfixable.
Complicating the matter, it seems that some players experienced problems after first accidentally downloading the Xbox One version by accident. Others were able to help the situation by disabling ray tracing — which is, after all, one of the selling points of the new systems.
A Treyarch Community Manager, FoxhoundFPS, who was tagged in the post, did respond. "Generally speaking, we're investigating all crashes and across the game," the Reddit user said. "We outline to contact our Player Support so that you can share details with them and they collate the feedback. My immediate recommendations are to make sure that you're using the correct version for your platform. Players have also shared that disabling Ray Tracing on XSX has helped. LMK if it does."
PlayStation 5 users haven't gotten off completely scot-free, either. They've also been experiencing some issues, although the new game isn't killing their consoles. Starting on launch day, PlayStation 5 owners were accidentally booting up the wrong version of Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War as a result of a default setting that needed to be changed by the player. Additionally, the game has apparently been disconnecting PlayStation 4's DualShock controllers. Treyarch says that this known issue has been fixed, and players need to update to 8.01 to repair the problem.
However, the developer's Trello board does not seem to show the specific Xbox-bricking issue among its "Global Known Issues" or anywhere else, although there's a more generic label for "Crashing and Dev Errors" that doesn't have any comments. The status of this issue is listed as "Investigating" and "Monitoring," which at least means the developer is on the case.
Treyarch just released a patch on Nov. 23, and there's no word on when another one to fix this big problem might be coming. Until that does happen, Xbox Series X owners might want to skip playing Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War for a bit, just in case. After all, while Microsoft has always had a good reputation when it comes to replacing broken consoles, starting with the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death problems, Xbox Series X units are still scarce right now.