Bugs are commonly a source of frustration or hilarity for players, as characters and objects clip through floors, turn invisible or suddenly go flying through the air for no discernible reason. Occasionally, though, players will come across a glitch that just leaves them going "...huh?" The latest bug to hit Call of Duty: Warzone falls squarely into that category.
It's fair to say that Warzone is no stranger to odd behavior, from the recurring infinite stim exploit which allowed cheaters to survive in the poisonous storm indefinitely to glitches allowing outside players to enter the Gulag and interfere with any of the last-chance 1v1 fights going on in there. Generally, most of these bugs end up giving one party or another an unfair advantage in the ensuing chaos of Verdansk.
This particular glitch is of a different stripe, though as Redditor LegendWho managed to capture the moment on camera. While driving around in a truck in the middle of a game, with 49 players still remaining, their screen suddenly shifts to a kill-cam before announcing their unexpected victory. Things got stranger after some resourceful folks checked the Warzone SBMM companion app and discovered that it wasn't just LegendWho: somehow, every single player in the lobby had been awarded a victory for the match after simultaneously and inexplicably dying.
The cause of the bug isn't yet clear, nor is it known how many others may have been gifted what essentially amounts to a Warzone participation trophy. It may be connected to a glitch discovered earlier this month, when a squad managed to secure a win without even touching the ground. At the time, the community suggested that the cause may have been server issues or some unflagged error in the game files, so similar explanations could fit for this as well.
With its continued relevance and position within the series as the binding agent between new and older releases in the franchise, Call of Duty: Warzone will likely see plenty of new content in the future to connect it to last year's Black Ops: Cold War and the planned 2021 entry. With each new major update, the chance of bugs and glitches slipping through the net spikes, so players will likely be keeping an eye out for bizarre incidents like this in the future too.
As far as bugs go, this particular one is certainly unusual but at least keeps everyone on something of a level playing field. Doling out victories to everyone upon some strange half-crash is certainly in a different league from Call of Duty: Warzone's thriving hacking and cheating community, even if it does slightly tweak some match-making stats in the process. No doubt if more comes out about it, whether it's more accounts of the glitch occurring or someone figuring out the exact circumstances needed to recreate it, Activision will push out a patch for it in short order.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.