Activision finally addresses Call of Duty's massive download sizes

Activision is finally taking steps to prevent Call of Duty games from taking up hard drive space. The games are notoriously huge, but the company will ease the burden somewhat ahead of the October 25 release. BlackOps 6.

How will this work? One big change is that War zone will be decoupled from the rest of the games in terms of standard downloads for annual titles. This change will take place on August 21st, coinciding with the launch of Season 5 Reloaded, and should actually be very helpful. War zone is huge (about 130 GB) and this can be frustrating for those who don't even participate in the Battle Royale mode.

In fact, when people buy an annual title in the near future, they will only download files for that specific game. Hard drives are suddenly a bit bouncy everywhere. Of course, the masochists among us can still optionally add and War zone game files with every purchase.

This is not the only measure Activision is taking, but it is probably the most important. The company is also expanding its use of texture streaming, starting with the upcoming War zone Update. This means that users won't have to download everything directly to their hard drive, as the developers will “move content that is less frequently used by players into a streaming cache.”

However, the developers warn that this could result in some of this content being displayed at a lower quality until the streaming cache is fully loaded. To this end, there are several settings for this feature. Finally, upcoming PS5 downloads will be split into multiple parts, many of which can be grabbed in advance. These downloads will also include file optimizations to further reduce the size.

As already mentioned, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be released on October 26th for consoles and PC. It will also be available on Game Pass from the day of release.