On August 3 Infinity Ward finally noted that they’re understanding of the obscene volume size of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and that the upcoming season 5 patch would reduce file size.
After the Season 5 patch on PC, the file size total now reaches absurd new heights at 227 GB, the largest it has been yet.
Either Infinity Ward presumes that storage space is in infinite supply for PC users (it is cheap, to be fair, compared to 2015 prices and size) or PC users are once again simply receiving the short end of the stick as the developers are more interested in the console experience than they are with the PC experience.
The cheapest price you could find to put Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on is around $30 for 240GB SSD; if you want to put it on an HHD (and again, we’re discussing having one drive for the entirety of the title) it would run $20.
While it admittedly isn’t much of a price for the content that Warzone alone offers, the idea of needing to pick up an additional hard drive just to prepare for additional development bloat isn’t an aspect that makes much sense; especially when there is empirical evidence that developers have a tendency to leave unused files in packages since it’s easier than removing outdated modules.
Whether the bulk of the file size is coming from audio, as is the alleged case with the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn PC port supporting eight different fully-voiced languages, or from high-resolution textures, is irrelevant at this point.
One thing I would love to see at the next #GDC would be a break down of #CODMW's production pipeline.
Shipping a game of that size must be insane and I honestly want to know how any game reaches 150GB+ in size.
— Ben (@nurodev) May 25, 2020
With this most recent patch, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare now holds the largest install size yet of any other PC game that we can find, breaking Quantum Break’s 178GB by a massive margin.
Others are noting that this may be intentional for the sake of thwarting piracy: it’s extremely difficult to safely torrent gargantuan file sizes in a piecemeal fashion, such as by torrent, without the files themselves becoming corrupted or missing data. It isn’t impossible, mind you; just difficult and time-intensive.
For others that are just interested in hopping into the impressive battle-royale (and it is impressive), it’s a massive headache that cannot be mitigated by conventional means, and Infinity Ward’s statement of reducing obscene file sizes has apparently meant little for the PC community; a pattern that has emerged to the frustration of the PC player base.
Many are stating that the file bloat is a sure sign of issues within the development pipeline, and are asking Infinity Ward for clarity as to what is occurring and if it will be mitigated by the developers. Infinity Ward has not yet responded to requests to comment on the file size for PC.