From Activision's perspective, the Call of Duty franchise has never been stronger. Thanks to the combined efforts of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone, net bookings for the series in 2020 eclipsed more than $3 billion. Calling it a financial success for Activision almost feels like an understatement at this point. But if one were to ask fans and regular players about the series, their answer would be markedly different.
Both Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone have come under repeated fire from players regarding frequent issues. The former has especially seemed to continuously draw ire over all manner of bugs and glitches since the day it launched. There have been exploits that have allowed players to make themselves invincible and one bug has been forcing Search and Destroy matches to end in draws. But one bug that appears to specifically impact the Xbox versions of the game is quite possibly the worst one.
Known as the 0x87de272b Error, this bug has been plaguing Cold War since it launched back in November and has been preventing players on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S versions from even playing the game. In fact, it doesn't let them launch it in the first place, meaning it boots them back to the Xbox's home menu before the title screen even pops up.
The problem has reportedly become more and more commonplace and, at the time of writing, neither Microsoft nor developer Treyarch have provided a solution. Apparently, the error occurs because the game's servers are detecting an unauthorized action, but it's unlikely that every player who is experiencing it is trying to play the game illegally or something.
Some players have said that switching to an alternative Xbox account allows them to work around the problem, but game progress doesn't carry over between accounts, so this would require players to start completely from scratch. There have been recommendations to simply uninstall and reinstall the game, as the error code might be similar to the 0x87DE2720 error code.
It's not just glitches that are upsetting players. The recent inclusion of League Play was something heavily requested by players, but many were less than pleased with its implementation, with complaints being lobbied at the ranking system not making sense and the rules being outdated.
Despite all these complaints, though, Cold War has been dominating the sales market. Only this week, it officially became one of the best-selling games of all time in the United States.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: DualShockers, Microsoft