According to Activision, Call of Duty files are finally being optimised to give players a better gaming experience and take up less space on their hard drives.
The in-depth post on the update schedule coming up as Black Ops 6 approaches states that there will be a staged approach to completely overhauling the Call of Duty HQ experience and organising and separating specific game files in the backend.
The first step in the process kicks off on the 21st of August and will include quite a significant update for all platforms. Activision states that once the update has been completed, Call of Duty’s overall file size should be smaller than when the update began.
This main update will reorganise game files on the backend to allow for some optimisation and separate all Call of Duty: Warzone files from the other Call of Duty games. This will finally allow players to download only the Call of Duty games they wish to play without having Warzone bolted on. Gamers who also want to play Warzone can then download the free-to-play battle royale separately at any other time.
This first update will also bring along with it a new form of content streaming technology. Those with pretty decent internet connections can stream high-fidelity content and textures straight from a server cache on Activision servers, thus saving your hard drive from having to keep them. Similar to how “On-demand texture streaming” works currently. A new “minimal” option will allow those who don’t have a lot of bandwidth to spare the same hard-drive space-saving capabilities, but at the cost of reduced graphical quality until the content can stream in.
Two more updates, including a Black Ops 6 Open Beta and a new User Interface update, will hit the Call of Duty Experience before Black Ops 6 launches on the 25th of October. For all the details and how PlayStation 5 users will experience the update, check out the Activision Blog Post, or stay a minute and have a look at the preview for the latest UI update below.
While this all sounds great on paper, I expect a 300GB file size to be dropped to 299GB just so that Activision can call it optimised.