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Call of Duty has been the meme when it comes to enormous games with untenable install sizes, enormous update files, and just generally taking up way too much space on hard drives. Sledgehammer Games revealed today that the Call of Duty: Vanguard install size will be “significantly below” previous Call of Duty games on next-gen consoles and PC, thanks to new on-demand texture streaming tech that is expected to save 30-50%+.
Good news for hard drives everywhere: #Vanguard’s install size at launch will be significantly below previous #CallOfDuty releases.
New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space pic.twitter.com/oYZoyIDTuO
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) October 26, 2021
While they didn’t say exactly how big the file size would be, previous estimations put Vanguard at still large, but much more manageable size of around 95GB. Now of course that file size is expected to change over time as updates are introduced and new seasons bring new content, but it’s still far better than the staggering 300GB install sizes that a full install of Black Ops Cold War was reaching, even after they reduced the file size. In fact, it was so large that full installs of Black Ops Cold War and Warzone wouldn’t even fit on a 500GB PS4 anymore, and the PS5’s limited internal SSD was bumping against its paltry 667GB usable limits. Seasonal updates were also data hogs, breaking ISP records for traffic usage.
It’s also expected that Vanguard will also follow previous Call of Duty games in allowing players to delete individual elements that they aren’t playing, so after you finish the campaign, you’ll be able to delete it, and if you don’t play Zombies, you won’t have to worry about having it on your system.
What’s currently unknown is how Warzone will factor in when it gets the new Pacific update to tie in with Vanguard. Warzone is currently tied to the 2019 Modern Warfare executable, which is a last-gen title. Raven hasn’t yet announced a next-gen version of the game yet or how that will work if and when it does happen, but it feels like keeping Warzone tethered to a 2+ year old game isn’t sustainable. Whether or not Warzone will become integrated into the Vanguard executable or break away to its own game remains to be seen, but this could also have an impact on the overall Vanguard install size.
Either way, it’s good to see the developers behind Call of Duty paying attention to one of the biggest (no pun intended) complaints in recent years and addressing install sizes, particularly for people who don’t want to shell out the price of half a console just to get an extra terabyte or two.
Call of Duty: Vanguard releases on November 5th, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before we discover exactly how big its install size actually is.