With the launch of Call of Duty: Vanguard, like always, comes a bevy of technical issues sure to frustrate gamers unfortunate enough to experience them. With every major release and every Call of Duty, depending on your platform and your luck you might have problems that range from mildly annoying to outright gamebreaking.
As Vanguard gets into the hands of gamers across the world, we’ll update this article with new information, but in this piece, we’re going to explain what you need to know about Vanguard issues and what you can do to fix them.
If you have trouble connecting to the Vanguard servers or otherwise experience any connection-related issues, like tons of lag, timing out, getting kicked out of games, etcetera, your first step is always going to be to check social media.
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Whether it’s Reddit, Twitter, or your personal social media platform of choice, if you experience an issue the best thing you can do is find out if other people are having the same problem. If it’s the case that a bunch of different people are having similar issues at or around the launch of the game, it’s overwhelmingly likely a server-side problem Sledgehammer will have to iron out themselves.
However, that’s not to say there aren’t steps you can take to try and address connection issues in Vanguard yourself. Though, these will be relatively basic things that aren’t hyper-specific to Vanguard problems in particular.
First off, restart your game, restart your computer, and restart your modem/router in that order. It may sound too simple to be effective, but these simple solutions can fix an ungodly amount of problems caused by a wide variety of factors. If it’s a problem on your end, chances are these fixes will solve it.
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If the above doesn’t work, deleting your installation of Vanguard and reinstalling is your best bet. Sometimes, files can get corrupted or strange glitches can pop up with your own local copy of a game’s files. This is unusual, but it’s certainly possible.
Now, if none of these fixes solve your issues and you see other people complaining about similar issues on social media, just hang tight as the issue will have to be solved by Sledgehammer or Activision.
Your game crashing is always a frustrating experience, and the bad news is that Vanguard’s underlying engine, the Modern Warfare 2019 engine, has a history of crashing problems, particularly on PCs with certain RAM configurations.
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So, it’s not out of the question that you might experience crashes, whether you’re on PC or on console. If you’re on console, unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do outside of restarting your game and console and waiting for a patch. Luckily, Call of Duty games don’t tend to crash incredibly often on console, and there isn’t much reason to expect Vanguard will be much different in this respect.
If you’re on PC and your game is crashing, there are a few steps you can take. First, make sure you’ve got enough RAM. This goes beyond making sure your PC meets Vanguard’s minimum requirements, too. If you run a lot of programs in the background or otherwise start a bunch of services with your computer, make sure to quit those apps and turn those services off.
Windows’ paging file is another good setting to look at. If you’re right on the edge of having enough RAM, making sure your paging file is set up and ready to go is a good way to get a few extra gigabytes Windows can use as RAM if need be, which can often be the difference between something running fine and it crashing.
Related: Does Call of Duty: Vanguard Have SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking?
Lastly, if you're overclocked, make sure your RAM overclocks aren’t too aggressive. The modern Call of Duty engine doesn’t always play nice with extremely high RAM frequencies, so if you’ve got 3600MHz or faster RAM, it might cause your game to crash.
If you get a certain error code or are experiencing a particular issue unique to your own computer, searching for it online is a great way to see if other people have this issue and have had any luck addressing it. With any big game release will come strange compatibility issues depending on what your personal device is like.
The last few Call of Duty games, spanning Modern Warfare, Warzone, and Black Ops Cold War, have had strange, glitchy matchmaking systems throughout their lifespans. If you played Vanguard’s alpha or beta, many of the same little issues remained, so it’s likely these kinds of bugs will persist.
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Common issues include not being able to join somebody’s party, parties breaking up, and not being able to hear the mic audio from party members. Plus, these issues are made more common by cross-platform play, meaning you’re usually more likely to experience them playing in a party with people not on the same platform as you.
On top of these kinds of issues, the Call of Duty party system itself, for the last few games, tends to be slow to update, meaning that if you’ve just recently loaded out a game and are sitting in the lobby, the game may still list your status as playing the game you just finished. Until it updates, the game may not let other people directly join your party without an invite.
All of the listed problems are solved by the same fix: restarting your game. This doesn’t just mean only your personal game either, because these issues can affect everyone in a party, so if you’re having trouble partying up with someone, for example, you both may need to restart your games. This usually fixes these issues, but at launch there may be server-side problems affecting matchmaking as well.
Related: Why Is SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking, in Call of Duty?
If restarting your game isn’t making life easier, you may just have to wait until Sledgehamemr has a chance to tweak the actual system behind-the-scenes. But just know that these kinds of matchmaking bugs aren’t uncommon and nor are they usually gamebreaking.
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