Some PlayStation 5 owners are reportedly struggling to play 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot on their consoles. When attempting to access any of the game’s three modes (Campaign, Multiplayer, and Special Operations), players receive a message that the required data package is not installed.
When players follow the prompts to download the data pack, they will see a message that their installation has been “paused”. There is no explanation as to why this is happening. The player is stuck in this state, the packets cannot be downloaded, but there is no clear way to restart the download or retry the connection.
But the most shocking thing is that Activision has been aware of the problem for months and has yet to fix it. This issue is listed in the bug tracker on the Activision support page. But there doesn’t seem to be any plans to fix it, and the page was last updated in March.
But even for those who haven’t faced this problem, playing Modern Warfare 2019 has been an absolute nightmare since Warzone was integrated into the game. With almost every Warzone patch, Modern Warfare’s data packs are deleted, forcing players to redownload hundreds of gigabytes of data. Part of the reason for this problem is the size of the Warzone. The current version takes up nearly 200GB of storage.
Since 2019, with the development of Warzone, a lot of work has been put into optimization. But every new optimization of the PS console operating system requires a new data package to be pushed – these data packages add up and count every data package pushed since the game’s launch, there are now 26 different data packages that players need to download.
This also caused the player to be unable to play properly because the player had no way of knowing which data packet was correct. But the most “interesting” thing is that no matter how many problems with the launcher, players can still play Warzone normally. This illustrates a key issue: As Warzone’s popularity rose, Activision shifted all development resources to the mode, abandoning Call of Duty: Modern Warfare entirely.
This had a relatively big impact on the older Call of Duty games. In the most optimistic scenario, perhaps Activision developers fix Call of Duty 16 with the launch of Warzone 2. But there’s a good chance the same problem will appear in the upcoming Call of Duty 19: Modern Warfare 2.