Ever since its launch, it feels as if Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has been plagued with constant issues. On launch day itself, some PlayStation 5 owners were unknowingly downloading and playing the PlayStation 4 version instead and some even reported that a failure to connect to the servers was preventing them from playing the offline campaign.
Xbox Series X owners arguably have it worse, as not only were they inadvertently downloading the Xbox One version of the game, doing so would lead to the console itself crashing. Fortunately, there was a simple fix for this, but now things have apparently got worse, as there are reports of some Xbox Series X consoles being bricked.
One Reddit user admits that playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War would occasionally lead to their console crashing, but they were always able to simply reboot it, until recently, with it crashing and not turning back on at all. Word of this has understandably worried other Xbox Series X owners, who don't want to risk playing the game at all if it means bricking their console.
Thankfully, developer Treyarch has been made aware of the issue and is already looking into fixing it with a patch. It's been added to the official Trello board, so players can remain up to date on it and other problems affecting the game. At the time of writing, though, it's unclear how long players will have to wait until this bricking problem is completely resolved.
In the meantime, Treyarch has provided some recommendations that should help people avoid it for the time being. Firstly, avoid accidentally downloading the Xbox One version, as mentioned earlier. Second, disable ray-tracing. Though the feature has been one of the new generation's biggest selling points, it has been reported that turning it off has helped players mitigate crashing issues. Not to mention, ray-tracing appears to cause other problems as well, like making online matches very laggy.
Hopefully, the wait for the next patch won't be too long, but it should be noted that Cold War only received a new patch very recently, which has made adjustments to the multiplayer and fixed stability issues in the Zombies mode, among other things.
One thing that may be harder to address, though, is the online toxicity. Though trash-talking is considered to just be a part of the Call of Duty culture, it's arguably evolved into something much worse.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.