CoD's Season 3 update broke the game for a bunch of players, and they're so upset one sent the devs a pizza

A pixel skull above a progress bar at 100%
(Image credit: Activision)

On April 12, Call of Duty received its biggest multiplayer update since the release of Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 with the launch of Season 3.The new season added a pile of new maps, guns, modes, and features—as well as adding one fairly significant bug.

Since the update, players with AMD Vega GPUs have been experiencing immediate crashes on booting both Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2, accompanied by a "DirectX encountered an unrecoverable error" message. It's also affecting players with Vega-based hardware, like the Radeon VII and pretty much every integrated GPU on a Ryzen processor.

After several days of complaints, including a thread on the Steam forums that now has over 1,000 replies, Beenox—the Canadian studio at Activision Blizzard responsible for handling the PC versions of Call of Duty—acknowledged the issue on Twitter. "We're investigating a crash on boot affecting AMD VEGA users on WZ2 and MWII", they wrote. "The team is actively working to get it fixed."

That was April 17, and players are still waiting for a fix. Some of them are getting desperate, starting a petition on change.org that demands, "It has been 2 weeks since most players have been able to play this game and either Activision takes action and resolves this issue or we should be eligible for a refund." Another player took the unusual measure of having a cheese pizza delivered to Beenox's office in Quebec with the message "Help Vega Please" written on the box. 

Based on the proof-of-delivery photo showing the pizza box sitting on what looks like a waiting-room bench, I suspect that pizza never made it to the developers. Meanwhile, the return of the relatively chill Plunder mode to Warzone 2 brought with it a bug that meant Plunder mode stats were being applied in the sweatier Battle Royale mode. That meant, as Raven Software put it, "Some of you are about to have a VERY sus K/D." The issue was listed on the Warzone 2 Trello board, and has now been marked as resolved. 

The Vega-related crash has yet to show up there or on the Modern Warfare 2 Trello, however, and I can't imagine sending another pizza's going to help. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.