Activision warns full Call of Duty (Warzone + Modern Warfare + Black Ops) no longer fits standard PS4 drive (!)

Via Eurogamer:

"Should you have both games installed and have kept up to date with updates, you may need to delete some unused game content to have a successful download and install of the Warzone patch tonight," Activision said.

The writer also explains that when he attempted to download the 17GB update file for the Modern Warfare content, he was warned he would need over 100GB of free space to install that file.

Now, I'm no Call of Duty player and I get the impression there's a lot of assets/content involved in having a complete collection of Warzone content. I also get that you can opt to uninstall the campaign content while retaining the multiplayer components which I'm sure accounts for quite a lot of hard drive space. But still...

As somebody who's perfectly satisfied with his base PS4 (and recently stumbled into ownership of a Switch) but still pines for a PS5, this is the first thing that gives me pause. I don't keep a ton of games installed, typically just the two or three I'm playing at any one time, but sometimes I like to keep old games around I really admired or enjoyed just to see them on my dash until I absolutely need the space.

While this news is a about PS4 hard drives, the PS5 hard drives aren't much bigger and it doesn't seem like crossover games we've seen thus far are any smaller. A brief Google search reveals Godfall was around 50GB, yeah?

This makes me a little more tepid to get a PS5 considering the established trend of multiple SKUs of home consoles (moreso Microsoft than Sony) and people who own PS5s already fretting over hard drive space, granting that most are critics are rotate through games much more frequently than I do.

So, what's the takeaway from this news? That Activision/the COD teams are awful at compression? That PS5s ought to just come bundled with an external hard drive, like, tomorrow? We should all just get a new hobby?

A single game potentially bigger than a single hard drive! What is this, 2002?

Note: edited to clarify while this news applies to the PS4, it makes me worry about getting a PS5 due to its hard drive size in a way I hadn't thought would apply to my life and gaming habits before.

How is the title of this post not Activision Warns All Your Base PS4 Hardware Space Are Belong To COD? It's the 20th anniversary. SHOW SOME RESPECT!

As for the substance here...I wouldn't worry about it too much for PS5. This seems to be very much a Call of Duty thing. A lot of other developers are actually getting better at compression (For example the Hitman 1 and 2 parts of Hitman 3 are much smaller than they were originally) and while I'm sure game sizes will continue to grow, the PS5 hard drive is probably big enough to hold 3-4 games at once (as long as none of those games are COD) for the life of the console. Right now the average size is 50-70 gigs, and even most huge games aren't much more than 100 (such as Forza Horizon 4 on Xbox with expansions.)

Even for COD this is only a problem if you want 2 years of the game plus Warzone installed at once, which is a lot.

In addition, the PS5 has a hard drive expansion bay that one presumes they will turn on at some point. And while you can't play PS5 games off an external hard drive, you can store them there so you don't need to redownload them.

What I'm saying is that yes it's an issue, but not a huge one, and one that has a bunch of reasonable workarounds even if it does get worse in the future.

The PS5 hard drive is plenty roomy for the average gamer so long as you're not playing 10 games at the same time. Is it ideal? No. But the speed of the SSD makes up for the inconvenience.

If you're willing to wait a couple years for a new model with a bigger hard drive that's on you, but remember that the PS4 Pro launched with a terrabyte, which helps but didn't solve the issue. I had to replace my hard drive on that to get the space I wanted anyway, so you may find yourself waiting a few years, missing out on the zeitgeist and not enjoying benefits like the fast loading speeds and Dualsense with the PS4 games you play, and then have to buy an expensive add on hard drive for your new PS5 Elite in 2024 anyway.

Not that there's anything wrong with waiting. I think waiting because you don't want to spend the money until there are enough games you want to play is totally reasonable. But I think waiting for a hardware revision that may or may not happen at some indefinite point in the future because of problems that may or may not occur is too many variables to justify it.

Ok, I gotta ask. How the heck are these games still sold physically? Are the coming on 4+ discs like a PS1 RPG?

@navster15: Lots of content is not on the disc. Some of the modes are online only, much of the content has been added via patches etc...

The only thing the disc actually needs to fully fit is the single player. I don’t think Warzone was even around for the discs being printed.

It’s 2021. Discs are more and more just authentication tools rather than actual full games. Even games with everything on them often need extensive patches to run right.

I took the entire game off of my Xbox One X after whichever update it was when it wasn't possible to play the campaign anymore unless I installed it again, which was ridiculous. I wanted to go back to finish Veteran mode (or whatever the hardest mode was called), but instead uninstalled and never went back.

Sony at least needs to let users start using the pcie expansion slot.

i believe they gussied up the language, but essentially there was a PS4 specific bug that forced them to redownload and stage the entire game's data every time it patched. as such, i assume that other developers/COD games will fix that issue and it wouldn't be a big problem on ps5. it wasn't an issue on the xbox or PC. i recall cross play with a friend on PS4 and when a patch hit i'd have to download something like 10gb (still quite a bit) but he'd be on the hook for 110

Doesn't the base PS4 have a 500GB HDD? I know that's probably more like 400GB in practice but that is an absolutely bonkers amount of space for two games to take up.

And all of that just to shoot guns.

@justin258: The PS4 has a weird data handling structure that it essentially needs extra space to recompile a game after downloading the file itself or even a patch. Usually that extra space is the file size of the game itself. That’s why it’s a PS4 specific issue, and doesn’t affect launch 500GB Xbox Ones or Series S’s (yet).

Thank fuck I don't play this series anymore.

This is why I get sick of the Call Of Duty series.

Not a game developer so I might be talking out of my ass, but I wonder if they'll be able to cut down on asset duplication in game files now that we're (in theory) moving to an age of high speed SSDs being the standard or is asset duplication still being used to the same degree in order to achieve these lightning fast load speeds on the new SSDs?

It's too bad we only had one generation of consoles with Practically Unlimited Memory thanks to external hard drives. I got a 4TB for my PS4 and never had to worry about space again. Even the 3DS and Switch are easy to upgrade with SD cards.

@eccentrix: It's possible (especially for Xbox) that they'll either figure out a way to make external SSDs work, or add a port to a future revision that's fast enough for externals. Both consoles do have upgradeable memory, it's just that the PS4's hasn't been turned on yet and the Xbox's, well, it's a weird card slot that seems very expensive. With an external SSD (or even normal hard drive) you can swap games pretty quickly, though, so it's not actually THAT bad, especially right now when there aren't many next gen games so most games are playable off an external.