Call to action: Black Ops Cold War, Modern war, and War zone are too big to coexist with a standard PS4 hard drive, Activision announced today.
On Wednesday night, last year Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War saw the second season update. This update is 10.5-26.5 GB of data, depending on the platform. This is remarkable, as it officially pushed the file size to Modern Warfare, Warzone, and Black Ops Cold War for a new milestone: all three games no longer fit on a single 500 GB PlayStation 4 hard drive.
The Call of Duty file size problem is not exactly new, but it takes the problem to a new level. And while you may wonder “why would anyone want three different Call of Duty games on their console at the same time”, consider how many modes each game offers. The multiplayer ecosystem between the two games is separate, Black Ops Cold War includes a Zombies mode and a campaign, and War zone it is its own way entirely. Hardcore Call of Duty fans who have already dedicated all of their internal storage to the last two games in the series will no longer be able to do that.
Fortunately, there are some solutions to this problem, although none that allow players to keep all the data at once. Players can navigate through the menus of each game and delete unwanted content, such as Zombies or the campaign. This should free up some space, but it does not help the player who is still working on the campaign in his spare time between Zombies, multiplayer and War zone sessions with your friends. However, unless that player is actively jumping between Black Ops Cold War and Modern war multiplayer, one of them must be completely safe to delete – especially considering that Modern Warfare is almost two years old.
It is not clear whether Activision, Infinity Ward, Raven and Treyarch will find a better solution for the storage wars. But at this rate, the steady growth of Call of Duty seems unsustainable, especially for players on older consoles with smaller drives.