There’s no game I play more than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the latest addition to the 17 year old franchise. It not only takes my mind off the real world and helps me relax but also improves my gaming intuition. With its thrilling and modern campaign, a wide range of game modes, a large and growing collection of maps and weapons, it is a much lauded first person shooter game with as many as six million players registered to play within its first 24 hours of release last August. As of July 2020, almost two million players tune into the game around the world, at any given moment.
However, if you’re like me and spend an inordinate amount of time over the last year tinkering with custom loadouts, unlocking blueprints and completing daily challenges, you might have noticed something annoying: the game has absolutely ballooned. Chances are, it’s the biggest game on your hard drive, and recent updates keep increasing the size a few gigabytes at a time.
Around April 2020, the game’s install size was 175.3 GB while an additional patch would be “15 gbs”. At that time my 1 TB PlayStation 4 was indeed running out of space, and I proceeded to delete a bunch of other 100+ GB games like Star Wars Battlefront II to make space for the new COD install, and then deleted parts of the install packages that weren’t required to play multiplayer or Warzone. In June, an 84 GB update package for Season 4 was made available, resulting in a net increase of 45 GB of the overall size of the game. Today, my game takes up 173 GB on my PS4, even after I got rid of unnecessary data packs that were just serving as dead weight.
To be fair, I have less of a reason to complain than most. It’s literally the only game I really play these days and uninstalling every other game for Modern Warfare wouldn’t be out of the question for me. However, my problem is with the precedent this situation sets; that game developers may have less of an incentive to manage the memory requirements of their games because people will buy high-storage devices.
The situation is even worse for players who don’t have a terabyte of memory, especially those with PCs. While Activision allows console players to uninstall parts of the game they don’t use, PC players don’t yet have that functionality. Despite space-saving accommodations like optional installs and update compressions, Infinity Ward can’t quite get this problem under control. Now it is known that growth of hard disk memory and game installs increases as games become more advanced technically speaking. However, given that the install size of this year’s COD has increased by an unprecedented amount, this staggering growth feels unusual and it’s fair to ask questions.
Image from IGN's Tom Marks (https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/25/every-call-of-duty-install-size-compared-from-2003-to-modern-warfare)
So what’s going on? Here’s the short answer from production director Paul Haile.
“just a ton of content... and also in this case since Warzone shares progression with MW every weapon and character asset from MP needs to also work in Warzone. Our pipeline isn't perfect but even if it was it's still a mountain of data to ship.”
I wanted to see how imperfect this really was, so I looked into the data packs and which game modes they require. First, I read through the descriptions of the data packs in Modern Warfare's settings menu. Here’s a breakdown of data packs that each game mode requires:
Campaign: Data Pack 1
Multiplayer: Data Pack 1, Multiplayer Pack 2 and 3.
Co-op: Data Pack 1, Spec Ops Packs 1 and 2, and Survival Pack (for Spec Ops Survival Mode)
When I click on an install, the game takes me to the PlayStation Store DLC menu that lists all the data packs and their install sizes. Below is a table combining both pieces of information.
The data packs with "N/A" aren't displayed in the game installs menu, but are listed in the PlayStation DLC add-on list. Note also that all ten data packs take up 95.6 GB. The rest of the 195 GB size of the entire game is presumably taken up by the Warzone game mode.
The first and perhaps only thing that becomes obvious is that this whole system of data packs, installs and compatibility is remarkably difficult to parse. It’s as clear as mud, if not less so. If you’re short on space, you should definitely uninstall the three packs for Spec Ops and Survival if you don’t use that game mode often, since they take up a fifth of the game. However, it’s impossible to delete the other two game modes individually.
For instance if you wanted to uninstall the Campaign, you could try to delete Compatibility Data Pack 1, but it takes away the Multiplayer mode with it. It’s unclear why you can’t uninstall the 27.8 GB Campaign Packs, which take up 14% of the total game, but aren’t listed as supporting packages in the game installs menu. What I guess has happened here is that Infinity Ward has designed their game in such a way that the multiplayer component draws on assets from the campaign rather than vice versa. Now that doesn’t really make much sense to me; after all most COD players are far more interested in multiplayer than the campaign. Why not design the game so the campaign uses multiplayer assets, and that way, data packs giving access to the campaign can be deleted once we’re finished playing the single-player?
That in a nutshell is why some players are taking issue with Infinity Ward’s approach. Even though the developers have introduced an option for console players to uninstall packs of their choosing, the fact that certain modes rely on data packs clearly earmarked for others prevents us from totally uninstalling modes we find irrelevant. Even if you don’t want to play the campaign, you can’t totally get rid of it to alleviate the disk storage problem. The sheer size of this game doesn’t quite seem to square with reality. Even the recently released The Last of Us Part II, which offers graphics up-scaled to 4K and a lengthy single-player campaign, clocks in at under 80 GB: less than half of the full storage space taken up by Modern Warfare.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that, by our estimates, Warzone takes up the remaining 100 GB. For those not interested in playing Battle Royale: bad luck. Warzone can’t be uninstalled either. Even though Activision has made it clear that their fancy new battle royale will link all Call of Duty games going forward, it’s hard to make the argument that all COD players want to make it a mainstay of their online gaming experience. At the end of the day, it’s still a secondary game mode that should be optional.
As one of the few military-inspired first person shooter games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare could certainly get away with hogging up your hard drive, but maybe not for much longer. The bigger the game gets, the more players get annoyed, and in the end it’s the business end that’s going to feel the crunch when more and more people call it quits and try to find other games to fill up that 200 GB space. Enough consumers are starting to notice the issue and voice their frustrations that Activision and the wider game developing industry is starting to take notice, and they better.
Comentarios