In under a fortnight, Call of Duty Warzone: Mobile went from global launch to a simultaneous Season 3 update, keeping up with console and PC schedules. But while the original Warzone has been out for four years already - allowing for plenty of time to fine-tune - Warzone: Mobile’s race to keep up hasn’t been possible without sacrifice, it seems.
Among those sacrifices, many Android players were stuck with low-fidelity graphics at launch, misconfigured settings, crashes, unexpected disconnections, and even overheating issues due to the default FPS cap being set too high. These optimisation issues are still being addressed and many Reddit users claim the fixes so far have done little to improve the experience of the game on mobile - if not outright made those issues worse.
Similar problems have occurred for some iOS players too, and now with the Season 3 update yet another issue has arisen: an overabundance of bots.
Bot’s up
Season 3 marks a major update for the classic version of Warzone, so the decision to roll it out in Warzone: Mobile at the same time is clear evidence of Activision’s goal to level the playing field and forge connections between titles. The mobile version's prime directive was to increase accessibility and provide a comparable experience to players cross-platform.
This goal was already apparent when Warzone: Mobile launched globally with Season 2 content, though does raise questions around development time and debugging capabilities when Season 3 was just around the corner.
However, rather than delay the global launch of Warzone and enter at Season 3, the game launched in Season 2 meaning a hefty update just two weeks after launch. It appears that in prepping both Activision may have spread Warzone: Mobile too thin from the get-go.
The main issue surrounds an increasing number of game-breaking bots that leave much to be desired. Disillusioned fans have been making their dissatisfaction known online in the days since, calling the bot surplus everything from "boring" to "isolating" and even "disgusting".
Despite this, the Season 3 update has brought in more revenue for Warzone: Mobile than it’s seen since launch week, peaking at $257,000 in daily revenue on April 6. According to AppMagic data, this marks the game’s best-performing day since March 24 when Warzone: Mobile made $340,000.
Even so, its predecessor Call of Duty: Mobile got off to a much stronger start.
