“Surprise!”, hollered a drunk Call of Duty earlier this month, dropping its pants in front of a deeply unimpressed paying audience. The strain of performance, year after year, was finally showing – and our Fraser struggled to find much to praise in Ghosts beyond “an early scene where a German Shepherd looks like he’s driving a jeep” in his Call of Duty: Ghosts review.
Ghosts would never admits its own flaws – but it has since committed itself to a path of self-improvement. Today, you’ll find it quicker on its feet and more reliable in online play.
AMD users will find latency improved somewhat, but other performance fixes will apply more broadly regardless of GPU. Framerate should now hold when traversing moving platforms, or during spamming barrages. And you might also notice improvements in level loading and shader warming – a GPU trick that reduces stuttering when entering new areas.
Crashes should happen less – during CODeSports play, and when spawning on certain maps and modes. Steam friends functionality is now more robust, and the smoke flickering and graphical corruption seen within the blurred area of some scopes can now be confined to memory. What’s more, broadcaster mode has become more comprehensively animated and, er, “usable”.
Finally: the dog. Her extended kills weren’t showing properly in the final killcam. No longer. And even better, the special, high-tech fur for Nvidia cards that was briefly patched out has now returned. A lucky few will be able to pretend they’re playing Zoo Tycoon instead.
Here’s the rest of today’s fixes:
- Fixed a variety of map specific spawn issues .
- Fixed lobby migration closing the create a class screen.
- Fixed not showing attachments and weapon camo for players while in private match lobby.
- Fixed loadouts appearing restricted if a restricted perk was selected in specialist strike package even though specialist wasn’t equipped.
- Fixed split screen UI issue that could potentially leave player in a bad state.
- Fixed issue when selecting store from squads.
- Fix to remember spectator team when switching to freecam in broadcaster mode.
- Fixed issue with loading into specific maps with ghost mask equipped.
Is there anything here that might warm you up to what’s turned out to be an altogether iffy game?