Activision may want to think about bundling hard drives with future Call of Duty titles, as the franchise’s patches are ballooning to absurd levels.
Infinity Ward released its Season 2 update patch this week, and players quickly noted its ridiculous size: the PC version weighs roughly 94 GB, while the PS4 and Xbox One patches measure around 51 GB and 68 GB, respectively. That’s bad news for impatient gamers, but it’s especially tiresome for those who are facing bandwidth caps.
This isn’t the first time that Modern Warfare got a massive patch, either. Just two weeks ago, Activision released an update that was reportedly 53 GB in size. The January 28th patch only involved a handful of playlist changes and general fixes, so the size seemed particularly strange.
What’s really hilarious about the updates is how they’re slowing down entire college networks. According to one redditor – who posted a screenshot from his university’s IT department as proof – students are being warned not to update the game until after midnight.
Infinity Ward production developer Paul Haile has apologized for the gigantic patches over Twitter. Apparently, the problem has to do with striking a balance between download size and disk footprint. It’s basically a toss up between whether you want a huge patch or a huge game installation, and Infinity Ward went with the former.
hey all – as we push season 2 live i just want to apologize about the download size of this update. we’re constantly trying to fight back against both download size and disk footprint and in this case we’re re-sending new asset packs to reduce the overall size of the game.
— Paul Haile (@Tyrael) February 11, 2020
Haile also mentioned that a DLC manager would be coming to the console versions. This will allow players to delete whatever packs they don’t want to save space.