After over a week-long delay, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone’s fourth season is finally upon us. Along with the expected new content and bug fixes, Infinity Ward announced that they’re actively trying to solve one of the game’s biggest issues that has been plaguing players since launch; the game’s absolutely massive file size.
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Ashton Williams, Senior Communications Manager at Infinity Ward, said that although the Season 4 update will be “large,” it will only take up an additional four GB of space once it’s installed. “In order to reduce the overall disc space that MW and WZ take up, we’re compressing a bunch of assets,” Williams explained. Basically, Infinity Ward is reducing the size of the in-game assets to make the overall storage footprint of the game smaller, but that requires resending those assets to the player, which explains the bloated size of the new patch.
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Williams elaborated further in a follow-up tweet, saying that the team is “continuing to sweep all assets to make size reductions,” while also making sure future patches are optimized “for size.” Infinity Ward is also giving console players the ability to uninstall content packs for modes that they don’t engage with in order to free up even more space. The process is done within the game itself and will also thankfully allow players to reinstall deleted content packs through their platform’s store.
This is all great news, but the obvious catch is that this currently only applies to console players. As it stands, Modern Warfare and Warzone take up over 200 GB on PC, and it remains to be seen how much that number increases after the Season 4 update. Hopefully, PC players will eventually receive the same treatment as their console counterparts somewhere down the line.
Season 4 of Modern Warfare and Warzone launches at 11 PM PT on June 10. The update is expected to be highlighted by new Operators including Captain Price, new maps including Scrapyard, and new weapons including the Vector.
