The latest Call Of Duty has been praised by critics as one of the best in the franchise, but recently it’s been coming under fire from fans who want to reclaim their hard drive space. This is because, on April 28th, two separate patches went live for the game.
These two patches were combined into a singular download, encompassing a 12GB update and an 18GB DLC add on, which was then mandatory for players to download in order to play the game. This brings the total size for Call of Duty Modern Warfare players on PC to around a whopping 180GB, and for console players around the 186GB mark. For a game, that’s definitely a hefty file size.
Players aren’t too happy about the chunky game either. While players who only downloaded the Warzone version of the game can cut down on the size of the overall download, players on console who enjoy the full COD MW experience now have roughly half of their console’s standard hard drives filled by the title.
Players have already taken to the likes of Reddit to voice their complaints – so much so that Infinity Ward had to come out and openly defend the size of the last COD update (50GB) to players, saying that while it was large, it would, in fact, help future downloads be smaller and take up less space. And, while 32GB is smaller than their previous updates, it could hardly be considered small – especially when you look at the overall size of the game.
In fact, Call of Duty Modern Warfare is more than double the size of Star Wars Battlefront 2 when it first launched for consoles – it’s fast approaching double the size following all the updates Battlefront 2 received as well, which brought the game to around 100GB.
The new download combines a patch and DLC features
So, why does Call Of Duty take up so much storage space? There are those online with the theory that if Call of Duty takes up a lot of room on a console or PC’s hard drive, then there is less room for other games to be stored – meaning a higher player engagement in COD, and a higher likelihood of microtransaction purchases.
Another theory is that the COD developers either aren’t bothered with, or aren’t very good at, file optimization and compression. Some in online forums have labeled Infinity Ward’s handling of files “sloppy”, and believe that better work could be done when it comes to the size of these updates.
Infinity Ward has yet to explain why the game is now exceeding the initial 175GB they advised for players to keep aside for the game, and why it looks like more space could be taken up in the future, but players are becoming agitated – especially when you consider that in order to play the game online, you need to have your game updated to the current version.