'Call of Duty: Warzone’ crashing involves an eerie black cloud of death

Call of Duty: Warzone has only been available for a day, yet players are already running into serious issues in the new free-to-play battle royale spin-off. The most terrifying of them all is a mysterious black cloud of death that stalks some players who kill an enemy.

This overwhelming glitch began appearing almost immediately for some gamers after Call of Duty: Warzone Tuesday launch at inconsistent points. After eliminating an enemy player, redditor u/Worgenator experienced an all-consuming black cloud of death that consumed his entire field of vision and seemingly chased him. (View his video at the top of this article.) In another instance, u/sneakishmonk experienced the glitch when under enemy fire, so there isn't a consistent trigger for this somewhat comical glitch. The whole thing actually has quite a mundane explanation.

This one of the funnier problems to grace a battle royale game in a while but is clearly detrimental to the whole experience, and it actually has a rather mundane explanation: As one commenter pointed out on another Reddit post's comments, this is a relatively common VRAM bug that can be fixed by lowering memory clocks and/or restoring the defaults or even lowering the resolution. But there are mixed reports about how effective these strategies are as a fix.

A whole suite of problems were bound to happen with such a large and ambitious game. Call of Duty: Warzone is the single largest battle royale game on the market, supporting up to 150 players on a single large map with tons of vehicles and loadouts to mess around with. Even after death, there's a chance that players can revive themselves in a Gunfight-inspired match in the Gulag or be revived by their teammates.

Redditor u/ctyldsley ran into the problem after his death in the Gulag didn't initially register. When he was finally revived, he could sprint at high speeds. There are also some reports of cheating already popping up in the game too despite the fact that Call of Duty: Warzone isn't even a day old.

Outside of those weird problems, there has reportedly been widespread reports of the game crashing. Sometimes it's in matches, but at other times players aren't even able to get beyond the title screen without the game crashing, especially on PC. Activision is looking into these issues and should offer hotfixes in a timely fashion. An account called ATVIAssist is responding to many Reddit reports about crashes asking for more details so developers can solve the problems.

With so many moving parts plus cross-play between three platforms, issues were bound to pop up. Some of them, like the black cloud of death, have proved to be more game-breaking than the usual launch glitch fair though.

The Inverse Analysis

While many of these issues are pretty frustrating, none of this comes as a surprise. Most live servicce games like this have lots of issues during their early days, and Call of Duty: Warzone clearly didn't buck that trend. Still, that doesn't make these issues any less of a problem, and the developers need to work hard to fix glitches like the black cloud of death if Warzone really wants to compete with games like Fortnite and Apex Legends.

Call of Duty: Warzone is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.