Year over year, Call of Duty continues to snowball into a bigger live-service gaming package, but if you’re someone who’s trying to keep up with the patch notes each update, the degree to which they have grown is astounding. Last week’s Season 3 Reloaded update for Black Ops 7 and Warzone is no exception, as the patch notes surpassed the length of some of the world’s most historic documents.
Call of Duty patch notes happen frequently throughout each game’s yearly life cycle. Sometimes the developer releases a small patch with only a handful of bug fixes, but others, like the big seasonal content drops, are now blog posts of mammoth proportions.
As someone who’s been covering Call of Duty for over a decade, I’ve read a lot of patch notes, and I find myself becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the abundance of text included
when patches arrive for the big seasonal and midseason “Reloaded” updates. Scrolling through pages of these seasonal changes really shows how much Call of Duty has grown and evolved over time.
Older games were easier on the eyes, often featuring only a page or two of changes in simple formatting, but before 2019, Call of Duty was often packaged mostly as a campaign and multiplayer bundle. Some games featured a third option like Zombies or a Spec Ops cooperative mode, but this collective was still relatively small compared to the Call of Duty offerings we have today.
Currently, Call of Duty HQ is a juggernaut of an application that bundles Black Ops 7’s campaign, multiplayer, Zombies, Warzone battle royale, and Treyarch’s new Endgame mode. That’s a whole lot of substantial, disparate content to convey changes for, and while the content variety can be welcomed, it creates pretty lengthy patch notes to read through.
I decided to scour the internet for patch notes from older Call of Duty games for comparison. Some of the original sources were no longer available, as older forums were phased out and replaced with different platforms for announcements. Using third-party sources to glance back at simpler times, 2012’s Black Ops 2 had meager patch notes under 600 words leading up to a major map pack DLC drop. This was a time long before Call of Duty had battle passes, operator bundles, free map drops, and battle royale.
Seven years ago, Black Ops 4 introduced Call of Duty’s first battle royale with Blackout. This was the first and only Call of Duty to ditch the campaign, and instead it came packaged with multiplayer, Zombies, and battle royale. For this year, Treyarch released Black Ops 4’s patch notes on its official Reddit page in a simple format. An example of these patch notes comes from Black Ops 4’s Season 6 update in September of 2019, which breaks down the details of DLC weapons, maps and modes for multiplayer, a new Zombies map, additional Blackout content, as well as all of the bug fixes and weapon tuning you’d expect to find. The patch notes here use only 2,128 words for everything. While this is a significant increase over Black Ops 2, it still pales in comparison to the most recent years.
Fast-forward a few years, and Call of Duty seasons further expanded in terms of content and patch notes. 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 reboot was packed with a campaign, multiplayer, Spec Ops cooperative mode, DMZ extraction, and battle royale. The game’s Season 3 patch notes for all modes combined was totaled at 7,652 words, which is a hefty increase over Black Ops 4 and other previous games. Reading through Modern Warfare 2’s updates often felt on par with short stories, and they even rival the size of some classic tales mentioned below.
It’s worth noting Call of Duty has also recently adopted a trend of frontloading the patch notes with some of the seasonal content highlights already announced in previous blogs, so you get a lot of recycled information before you ever get to the actual changes and bug fixes. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that the patch notes are continuously increasing in length.
Call of Duty’s new Season 3 Reloaded update massively outshines that number. Just the Black Ops 7 side of the update includes 4,874 words of patch notes. For context, this makes these patch notes longer than the entire United States Constitution (at roughly 4,543 words) and more than three times the length of the Declaration of Independence. It’s even longer than England’s historic document, The Magna Carta. Add in the Warzone patch notes, and your eyeballs will be treated to an additional 3,436 words. Yeah, that’s 8,310 words total to find out everything that was updated with Season 3 Reloaded.
Think that sounds extreme?
Midseason patch notes can be shorter than those found in the initial seasonal content drop, so if you go back and total up the count for the big Season 3 update last month, you get a whopping 12,578 words across all modes. That’s 8,852 for Black Ops 7 and 3,726 for Warzone, which, when you factor in all the images and weapon tuning charts added throughout the patch notes, creates an experience that starts to feel more like reading a Call of Duty novella.
Calling Call of Duty’s Season 3 patch notes a novella might be an exaggeration, but they are longer than some notable pieces of literature. This comparison includes The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as Washington Irving’s famous tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman clocks in at around 8,000 words. That’s shorter than Call of Duty’s patch notes blog from either of the last two major updates.
Season 3’s initial patch notes are roughly six times the length of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. How long before these seasonal updates turn into full-length novels the size of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace?
If you want to compare the scale of Call of Duty’s patch notes in reverse, the English translation of War and Peace is roughly 560,000 words, meaning the novel is about 45 Call of Duty patch notes long. Stephen King’s uncut edition of The Stand is roughly 470,000 words, making it just over 37 patch notes in length. This means if you have read all of Call of Duty’s seasonal patch notes for the last two years alone, you’ve read the equivalent of a full-length novel, and you’d be halfway through one of these massive pieces of literature.
In all seriousness, the patch notes can be overwhelming, but we’re here to read them for you. If you want to see what’s changed in this latest midseason update, but don’t want to strain your eyes, we highlight some of the biggest changes across Black Ops 7 and Warzone for Season 3 Reloaded. These updates include weapon tuning, scorestreak changes, bug fixes for Zombies, and the removal of Warzone’s standard Black Ops Royale mode.
