Call of Duty Devours Disk Space; Here's When This Became a Problem
Successive installments of the Call of Duty series have been surprisingly huge for years. We checked at what point the series began to grow, consequently reaching absurd volumes.
Call of Duty games have been growning over the years. Nevertheless, initially, nothing indicated that in terms of size the next installments of the series would turn out so big. It's worth taking a closer look at this issue and see how long it has been since Call of Duty started playing at heavyweight, and when it moved to super-heavy.
Has Call of Duty always been this big?
The first Call of Duty games were characterized by a rather modest size, which was first the aftermath of the limited capacity of the medium (DVD), and later also the marginal role of digital distribution. Over time, however, the situation began to change - starting with the 2009 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, describing the size of successive parts of the flagship series of shooters from Activision, we were no longer talking about a few, but dozen+ GB.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2Source: Acitivision / Steam
The real breakthrough came in 2013, when Call of Duty: Ghosts went on sale. At that time we witnessed a great leap - from 16 GB occupied by the previous installment of the series (Call of Duty: Black Ops II) to 40 GB that had to be reserved for Ghosts.
- One of the reasons for this was the advent of 8th-generation consoles, as well as the increasing importance of digital distribution, which only in the era of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has settled on consoles for good.
- Nevertheless, one Reddit user argues that the culprit for this state of affairs was a dog (which at one time was advertised as one of the most important elements of the game; that's a Pepperidge Farm remembers moment right here).
Another significant leap in the size of Call of Duty games took place in 2019, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare appeared, along with the free Call of Duty: Warzone. This time the developers went all the way - their creation occupied 175 GB. As Infinity Ward's project was the first to work on a new technology , at least part of the blame for this state of affairs can be placed on the change of the graphics engine (another thing is that the game no longer had a dog to take the rest of the responsibility...). As you can guess, many players were understandably mad with the devs for this.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)Source: Activision / Steam
At the time these words are being written, since the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare only one installment had a size of less than 100 GB on its debut day.. We are talking about Call of Duty: Vanguard, which, as announced, weighed "only" a few dozen GB. Nevertheless, a year later, everything was back to "normal".
It is also worth noting that with the development of individual titles, their size gradually increased. For example, at one point Call of Duty: Modern Warfare grew so large that it could fill a 250 GB SSD all by itself.
Call of Duty - the size of successive parts of the series
Above you'll find a chart showing the sizes of successive major Call of Duty installments. The source of the data was the official PC system requirements available at the time of the release of the respective title. An exception is Call of Duty 3, which was not released on PC, and its size is given for the Xbox 360 version, available on the Microsoft Store.
Console versions of the main installments have been omitted, among other reasons, because they often vary in size across platforms. We have also omitted spin-offs - from typically console items, such as Call of Duty 2: Big Red One or Call of Duty: Roads to Victory, to titles designed for mobile devices, led by Call of Duty: Mobile.
Finally, it is worth noting that wanting to install all Call of Duty games we need to free up more than 1.4 TB on our drives...
