COD: Black Ops Cold War follows the trend for taking up huge amounts of disk space like the rest of the franchise. When it was originally announced, the PC version was a whopper in terms of file sizes. The game took up a huge 175GB for installing the singleplayer and multiplayer modes.
So when the game launches, that’s going to change a fair bit. With the reworked version of the game PC gamers will now need 82GB for installing both SP and MP modes. The singleplayer will take up around 47GB, while the multiplayer clocks in at around 35GB. The full textured pack version will still weigh in at a hefty 125GB of free hard-disk space. That accounts for both ray tracing and 4K texture pack. This will unlock the Ultra graphics preset and include all the visual bells and whistles. If you’re not the kind of person to enjoy that, then you can save some bandwidth on it.
It’s something that console games could learn from. The need for compression and better file handling is becoming more and more important in gaming. The reliance on SSDs means that files need to be loaded into memory as fast possible, and smaller sizes work better for this. Even as vRAM and RAM pools get larger, there’s an upper limit to how much can be done. And at some point, developers will have to look into pushing files out with better compression and streamlined asset delivery.
And as many areas of the world have to still deal with bandwidth caps in 2020, downloading 125GB worth of data can be pretty prohibitive.
COD: Black Ops Cold War is following the trend of other PC games like Path of Exile and Warframe, both of which did something like this in 2020. Both of these F2P games brought out the compression machine to bring down file sizes for future updates, making the overall size of the games on PC much smaller.
