As much as I would like to have a full gaming experience with Call of Duty: World at War, I don’t think it’s possible.  I’ve encountered so many errors and issues that I don’t think I can remember all of them.

It initially started on the beta.  I had a few days of fun with the beta and suddenly one day it started crashing after getting partially through the map load screen…the screen would flash and then crash.  There was an error message but the brilliant minds at Treyarch didn’t think to allow the error to show over the game executable dialog so I have no idea what the message was, just showed an error dialog that couldn’t be viewed.  I played with settings and found that if I disabled Crossfire on my dual ATI Radeon 3870′s, and clicked on restore factory defaults (I didn’t change anything but did it anyway) it worked.

I had a working system.  I bought the Collectors Edition, had the same issue and did the same “fix” and was able to play the full game.  I started having horrible lag and issues in both multi-player and co-op.  I dropped the resolution down to 1680×1050 (from 1920×1200) and it seemed to help.

I removed my 3870′s and upgraded to a 4870 this past week along with a Corsair 750w PSU.  The problems all started over.  Constant crashes but this time I had no second card to disable to fix it.  I tried the restore factory defaults to no avail.  I attempted to find some resolution at the forums but alas the search on Callofduty.com (still) didn’t work… neat.

I uninstalled my X-Fi drivers, ATI drivers, the game.  I ran driver cleaner to remove all folders and directory references to both Creative and ATI.  I went through manually and removed a few others that I found based on some forums.  I reinstalled the ATI drivers, rebooted, reinstalled the X-Fi drivers, rebooted, updated the X-Fi drivers, rebooted.  I reinstalled DirectX 9c and rebooted.  I reinstalled the game and started to get a direct3ddevice9 error as soon as MP launched.  I was also getting an unhandled exception error on SP.

Search seemed to finally work after nearly a month on callofduty.com and I found a thread that about having .NET Framework 3.5 sp1 installed. I updated to this and reattempted.  Wow! Now I can launch the game and as soon as I connect to a server I get the direct3ddevice9 error.  I backed down to Radeon 8.9 drivers (from 8.11) and attempted another reinstall of DirectX 9c November release.  I actually got in a game and it seemed faster than ever before and things were looking up.

I attempted single player and it crashed with a black screen, no message.  I did the reset video and it loaded to the menu.  I changed video back to my normal settings, launched the game and no audio on the dialog with the opening scene (but audio worked on the intros).  I exited SP, restarted and got missing textures (like the head of the Japanese general and the private he’s burning with a cigar) and the audio still didn’t work.   Textures were all screwed even after starting.  I tried backing down graphics and back to the black screen on load.

Screw it, I’ll stick to MP I thought.  I launch MP, select a server, the map starts loading and I’m back to either the direct3ddevice error or I get an unhandled exception after I had hope that I could at least play MP.  The next time I launch, I get an error that CoDWaWmp.exe is not a valid Win32 application.

I reinstalled the game another time tonight.  I launched and got the same CoDWaWmp.exe is not a valid Win32 application error.  I applied the 1.1 patch since I hadn’t done that after installation but I still get the invalid Win32 app error.

What I really love is the people on callofduty.com that probably haven’t had an issue before and are completely clueless on computers other than what they’re told replying to threads calling people idiots because “it works fine for me”.  Since I’m reading that some people are running fine and suddenly get one of these issues (as I did with the beta), I look forward to seeing these same people eat their own words.

I guess my next step will be to update to the ATI 8.11 drivers again and retry.  If that doesn’t work I guess I could reinstall XP for ONE FREAKING GAME not working.  Everything I play works fine including Call of Duty 4.  I opened a ticket on Activision’s site and we’ll see how they respond.  They asked for a dxdiag log so we’ll see.  The most piss poor implementation of a game I’ve ever seen.