Why Modern Call of Duty Games Demand Massive Amounts of Storage Space

As an enthusiastic COD player for over a decade, I‘ve watched with both awe and frustration as each new series entry demands more and more of my console or PC‘s finite hard drive space. It‘s not uncommon now for a fully updated Call of Duty package consisting of Warzone and the latest premium release to occupy 200-300GB or more. With some quick napkin math, that‘s enough space to hold 50-100 average sized games!

So how did we get here? How is it that the same shooter franchise that fit comfortably on two Xbox 360 discs in 2007 now requires a small solid state drive just to itself? As a gamer and analyst obsessed with COD, I‘ve done deep research into the technical and design decisions that cause the series‘ seemingly limitless appetite for storage space.

Ultra-High Fidelity Assets Drain Disk Space

The most straightforward explanation is that Modern Warfare (2019), Black Ops Cold War (2020), Vanguard (2021), and Warzone 2.0 simply look miles better than earlier series entries. Specifically, these newest titles boast:

• Completely re-crafted engines purpose-built for the current console generation (MW) or significantly upgraded from past versions (Cold War). These bleeding edge engines cram in technical advancements like photogrammetry, volumetric lighting, ray tracing acceleration and more to push visual fidelity to new heights.
• Painstakingly detailed 3D scanned environments, weapons models, operator skins, textures and animations that vastly increase polygon counts and texture resolution requirements compared to older titles. For example, Modern Warfare crams up to 5 times as many polygons per character model versus past games.
• Expansive, intricately crafted multiplayer maps teeming with fine-grained environmental detail across sprawling layouts, dwarfing simpler maps of old.
• Cinematic single player campaign visuals that blur the line between pre-rendered cutscenes and real-time graphics. Recent entries aim for photorealism, a monumental leap over old-gen console tech.

All this eye candy comes at a heavy cost though, with 5K textures, highly complex simulated interactions, gigantic maps, and vastly more polygons to render driving storage requirements sky-high.

For context, here‘s a breakdown of how the ballpark 100GB download for Warzone 2.0 fills up:

Similarly, Infinity Ward had to design Modern Warfare ground-up for 4K resolution, volumetric lighting, and other breakthrough graphics techniques that crank assets to 11 across the board.

Shared Content With Premium Games More Than Doubles Install Footprint

Originally launching as a complimentary add-on mode for 2019‘s Modern Warfare reboot, Call of Duty: Warzone shares a massive volume of art, animations, sounds, backgrounds, and other data with the premium base game.

This means players wanting to experience everything Warzone has to offer also need upwards of 100GB or so of Modern Warfare assets sitting around. Rather than standalone like earlier famous battle royale pivots Fortnite and PUBG, Warzone‘s free-to-play model counts on keeping players entwined with the core series.

Activision essentially created two completely different triple-A sized experiences that leverage a shared pool of visual assets, audio effects, weapon models, operator skins and so on. Instead of just Warzone‘s roughly 80-90GB by itself, this balloons to a staggering 170GB+ with Modern Warfare included as designed.

And even Warzone 2.0 launching alongside Modern Warfare II again shares art assets, gameplay logic, menu systems etc. with the premium counterpart. This circles back to the original "two games for the price of one" pitch when the original Warzone dropped.

mountains

Constant Content Updates Bloat Games Over Time

Yet another contributor to COD‘s expanding waistline is Activision and its three rotating studios continuously pumping out piles of post-release multiplayer maps, cosmetics, weapons, limited time modes and other content to keep fans engaged and spending.

Looking specifically at 2019‘s Modern Warfare for example, the game launched at around a [175GB requirement in October 2019](https://www.pcinvasion.com/call-of-duty-modern-warfare– 175gb/). Fast forward just 8 months to June 2020, and Modern Warfare plus Warzone ballooned to a rotund 250GB through continual updates.

Now while some of that growth came from bug fixes and gameplay optimizations, the majority clearly stemmed from:

• 6 post-launch multiplayer maps – Individual maps easily take up 1-3GB each given their visual fidelity and scale, quickly adding up.
• 4 battle pass content drops – Each 100-tier battle pass adds skins, blueprints, emblems, XP boosts and more to earn – much of it visual so storage-intensive.
• Playlists – New playlists and modes that reuse existing assets still require some underlying data.
• Store bundles – Paid cosmetic packs include skins, highlight intros, sprays etc. that must be downloaded for users that unlock them. These glorious optional skins have 4K resolution, normal maps, specular maps and more heaping onto the pile.

To visualize the impact over time, here‘s a chart tracing Call of Duty‘s 2019 release ballooning from 175GB at launch to 292GB by April 2022 through ongoing content updates:

Clearly adding piles of free and premium content over months to an already gargantuan game contributes heavily to the nightmarish, phone hard drive-eclipsing sizes CoD has hit.

Optimizing File Size is NOT Top Priority

Finally, while ballooning game sizes surely tie into improving graphics, expanding content libraries and shared assets across linked games, the reality is Activision likely just doesn‘t prioritize storage optimization the way some other publishers do.

Call of Duty has ruled first person shooters sales-wise for nearly two decades, so they earn leeway to focus resources on crafting jaw-dropping visuals and exciting new online modes rather than reducing redundancies in their install footprint. Industry analysts have pointed out the company could almost certainly achieve some meaningful savings though measures like:

• More aggressive texture compression
• Reducing redundant data across shared assets
• Optimizing redundant data across single player, multiplayer and Warzone
• Deleting unused/old content post-launch
• Improving engine efficiency

For contrast, a game like Microsoft Flight Simulator streams the majority of its visual data from the cloud rather than eating hard drive space. Other shooters manage to pull off file size reductions upwards of 50% via compression tech and deleting unused assets.

So while undoubtedly impressive, Call of Duty‘s graphical masterclass requires compromise, exemplified by Modern Warfare II 100+GB day one update that leaves little room for other games. Performance still reigns supreme over storage savings for the shooter juggernaut.

The Outlook

Looking ahead, while shared assets between free and paid games plus huge post-launch content drops look here to stay, at minimum Activision promises a smaller footprint for Warzone 2.0 and MWII at least relative to past combos.

Console makers like Sony and Microsoft now offer storage expansion options to accommodate ever-growing game installs. And as asset creation pipelines improve and internet speeds rise, possibilities exist like streaming high resolution textures on the fly instead of stuffing 4K versions of everything into local game files.

Still, for the foreseeable future expect to continue carving out increasingly ridiculous allocations of your console or PC‘s disk space to host premium CoD packages lumbering into the triple digit GB range year after year. Because for the series that moves 10s of millions of copies annually, visual splendor, content breadth and technical achievement take priority over restraint when it comes to install size bloat.