Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has been updated to run on dedicated servers on PS4 and PS5, which should go a long way to ensure a more level playing field for varying connection stability, and will stamp out the blight of host migrations in matches.
With the success of the ported releases of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 for PS4 and PS5 this summer, with the two games reportedly selling in excess of 7 million copies, Activision has gone on to pour effort into updating and maintaining these new versions of the games. This has included stamping out security flaws in the code, adding new UI settings, and working to improve game stability in various ways.
The latest update for Black Ops 2 adds dedicated multiplayer servers, taking over from the player-hosted PvP of old. This puts an Activision server in the middle of all player connections and helps to improve game stability, stop host migrations if the host quits mid-match, reduced the impact of latency, and can also provide improved game security.
All good stuff, which makes it all the more bizarre that all of this effort is exclusively for the PlayStation platform. Activision is owned by Microsoft, and none of this is coming to Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One. Those systems can still play these games via backward compatibility, but there’s no updates coming to the old Xbox 360 codebase. Adding dedicated multiplayer servers shows that, where there’s a will, there’s definitely a way to make this kind of fundamental improvement, even with relatively minimal ports or remasters of these games.
Here’s the latest patch notes from 10th September:
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on PS4/PS5
New updates are rolling out now, including:
• Dedicated Multiplayer servers for improved match stability and security
• Improved support for joining friends
• Various Custom Emblem, UI, and MP heatmap globe fixes
Note: Dedicated servers began rolling out over the past several days, and 100% of MP matches have now been migrated to dedicated servers with today’s update.
Call of Duty: Black Ops on PS4/PS5
A new update is rolling out now, including:
• Friends list and Blocked list now properly update for all logged in players
• Various stability and UI fixes
• Improved forming regional lobbies to reduce network connection issues
• Added missing time limits to Custom Games
• Added Edit Game Options menu for Split Screen play
• Added ability to edit Pre-Match Timer for LAN Custom Games
• Improved Contracts menu navigation
• Players can now clear Clan Tags by entering an empty tag
• Fixed an issue where changing teams in Private Matches or Combat Training could lead to the player dying and being unable to respawn
via Reddit
