Call of Duty is one of the world’s most popular video game franchises. The first-person military shooter series sells millions of copies yearly, and a wide legion of fans approach each game with heavy anticipation. Unfortunately for them, anyone that has tried to keep up with CoD over the years has found it more difficult to play all of its games. Ever since Modern Warfare and Warzone released, the series has become infamous for ridiculously large file sizes. At one point, a standard 500gb PlayStation 4 was unable to hold the three most recent CoD games on a single console.
It makes sense why these games are so huge. The amount of detail that goes into them, and how big games like Warzone are, contributes to that huge download file. Thankfully, it seems like the developers of the franchise are starting to find ways around this to make games that are at least slightly smaller. The upcoming Call of Duty: Vanguard is still going to be a sizable game compared to the average game’s download size, but in comparison to other Call of Duty games it’s going to be smaller.
Details about download size and other aspects of the upcoming game are on CoD’s blog.
Due to new on-demand texture streaming tech, Vanguard’s install size at launch will be significantly below that of previous Call of Duty releases – up to 30% – 50%+ of a file size difference on next-gen console and PC.
By console, these are the estimated file sizes needed to install Vanguard at launch, including via pre-load, as well as the disk space needed to play the game:
PlayStation 5: 64.13 GB Download | 89.84 GB Required Space
PlayStation 4: 54.65 GB Download | 93.12 GB Required Space
Xbox Series X |S: 61 GB Download | 61 GB Required Space
Xbox One: 56.6 GB Download | 56.6 GB Required Space
Considering that Black Ops Cold War managed to push over 100 GB on some platforms and a patch was necessary to reduce Warzone’s size we should all be pretty happy to see that all of these console sizes are starting off below 100GB. Hopefully future patches don’t push them further than that.
One thing that does stand out of course is how PlayStation is well above the Xbox in terms of necessary space. This is because of the PlayStation-only issue where the console requires players have more space on their console before downloading a game. So while the game is actually smaller, PlayStation owners still have the misfortune of needing almost 100GB of free space just to download Vanguard.