If you grew up playing NES games and other venerable offline consoles, you'd eventually ask, "Why is Call of Duty Modern Warfare's Latest Patch Large?" We enjoyed N64's Golden Eye despite its characters' blocky appearance. We even cheered for Solid Snake on multiple occassions. Yes, we do understand that these two generations of games are miles apart when it comes to gameplay and visuals. But when comparing to other recent generation games, CoD's most recent installment seems to fall behind in terms of file and coding efficiency. After all, running a huge game requires a capable gaming pc with good, if not the best, gaming parts.
Modern Warfare Season 5: The bigger the better?
With the latest season rolling out, expect that the huge update will surely eat up on your systems free storage space. On the PS4 alone, the update comes at a whopping 36GB. To further add insult to this digital injury, your system has to have at least 90GB of free storage just for the download to start. Talk about storage real estate.
Previously, there was a bug for Xbox One players. They needed to shell out more than twice of that free storage space at around 66GB. This has already been resolved but despite it being a bug or a necessary update to the game, the question remains. How large is large enough for a game update to be considered justifiable?
The saving grace though is despite the fairly large free space storage requirement, Infinity Ward production director Paul Hail mentions that though the initial download and free space required are large, once installed, the game's total directory size will actually shrink-at least on the console-side of things.
Latest season versus storage size
Huge updates mostly come with equally huge changes and Call of Duty Modern Warfare isn't new to this practice. There'd be major changes to their Warzone battle-royale-inspired map, and there's even a possible crossover to Call of Duty 2020's latest installment. All these come with a price-your system's storage capacity. Though we've seen a downward trend in storage pricing, it won't really hurt that much if most game developers focus on optimizing their games in terms of the storage requirements rather than just on the visual side of things.
How would it affect the over-all gaming experience
Playing first-person-shooter games is fun but the stress brought by demanding component files on your system takes the fun off from the experience. Years ago, we mostly didn't care if our avatars were pixel-perfect. What mattered was the game experience and gameplay. We understand things change for the better or for the worse. But the big picture is, in this era of update-reliant games, not everyone has access to fast internet connection and obviously, the larger the game file sizes get, the harder it gets for your system to cope. That is unless you've got plenty of leg room to afford such huge updates.
