Why is Call of Duty so big Reddit

I am a humble woman of moderate means, just trying to vent in a game where I can legally and morally shoot people with awful names but I find that I need an absurd and, actually, unreasonable amount of memory to do so. How does CoD manage to take up so much memory?!

It rivals bigger more developed games like RDR2 and GTA. Am I missing something? Is this the appropriate amount of memory required or is there some bad coding going on in the studio? I was really frustrated but after spending 3 days trying to install Modern Warfare I'm just amazed.

To come at this from another angle...

It's easier for a developer to just say "well, it can be larger" to solve certain problems, now that developers aren't limited by the size of a medium like DVD - and, in CoD's case, it keeps getting bigger, and people keep buying it.

If they ever make it so big it dents their sales, then the next one will be optimised more for size. So, in a sense, it's huge because people will put up with it.

This is practically a meme at this point. Many people are frustrated and I understand why. This game does take up a lot of storage space and the updates are some of the largest I've ever seen from a game. On 1st gen PS4s and Xbox Ones, the game in its entirety takes up almost half the entire HDD!

But while many may complain about this and blame Infinity Ward, the reasons for such a large storage size are out of their hands. I will explain below:

Hardware Limitations

The HDDs of the PS4, Xbox One and most PCs are incredibly slow. Developers often have to use tricks to reduce loading times. The main tactic used is to duplicate files across the HDD, so that the HDD spindle doesn't have to move much keeping the seek times lower and thus game loading times shorter.

Generally the rule is the more file duplications the shorter the loading time. Modern Warfare has pretty short loading times compared to most games. Infinity Ward will have duplicated a lot of files to achieve this.

Map Size and Content

This game has a lot of maps, some of them are large and much bigger than maps in previous games. The more maps there are, the more storage taken up. The larger the maps, the more storage said maps take up compared with average sized maps. Ground War and 10v10 maps will take up more storage space than the average 6v6 map. So will the Warzone map.

Graphical Quality

Games are made up of models and textures. The higher the quality, the more storage space taken up.

Before Modern Warfare's release, Infinity Ward had an interview in which they stated with their latest game engine they can render x5 the polygons on-screen than previous games. This means the maps, character models, weapon models, etc, take take up more storage space than previous games. Add to that the increase in texture quality with 4K textures and the new volumetric lighting system.

Generally the rule is the more detailed the graphics, the larger the game files. This game has considerably better graphics than previous games in the series, files will take up more storage space.

File Compression

You can often reduce file size by employing some form of file compression to keep the file data the same, but taking up less storage space. Many developers do this and one popular compression format is called Kraken.

A lot of developers use this on the PS4 and Xbox One. But the thing is, compressed files need to be decompressed to be used. Generally decompression is done on the CPU. As a general rule, the more sophisticated the compression and the better at reducing file size the more CPU resources the act of decompression needs.

Looking at the update sizes and the overall size of the game, it still looks too big to me even when accounting for file duplications. What's very likely is Infinity Ward either uses zero file compression or a very light form of compression. Why? Well back to the point about CPU resources. To keep framerates high or at least at 60fps, the CPU needs to be able to work with the GPU fast enough. A sacrifice to CPU performance would result in a hit to the framerate of the game. For the most part on console, the game runs at 60fps if not very close to it. The game would run noticeably lower with heavy decompression on the CPU as the Jaguar CPU cores of the PS4 and Xbox One are very weak.

They did what they had to, for the benefit of the games framerate.

Conclusion

As you can see, the reasons for Modern Warfare updates being so large and the game taking up so much storage space are out of Infinity Ward's hands. To reduce the size considerably, the scope of the game would have been sacrificed. An aspect of the game or many aspects would have to suffer.

They would either have to sacrifice the large gameplay modes, or the quick loading times, or the graphical fidelity of the game or even the framerate. All of these things make Modern Warfare what it is. I'm sure most of you can agree, storage space was the least significant sacrifice in order to achieve what this game sets out to do.

Next-gen

Many of the hardware limitations of the current-gen don't exist in the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Both consoles have extremely fast SSDs with instant seek times. File duplication is not needed at all. Both have dedicated decompression chips, meaning there isn't a technical reason not to compress game files. There will be much less files, coupled with said files taking up less storage space.

Now next-gen games will also increase in graphical fidelity. So just how much storage space they take up remains to be seen.

I hope all this helps explain things in an easy to read manner!

EDIT

As a Redditor below told me, I haven't explained why updates in particular are so large. The above explains why the game is large in detail, but not updates in particular. It's for largely the same speed/seek time reasons explained above, but I will explain this in a bit more thoroughly below.

Update Size

Large updates are large on purpose. The reason is to avoid a long installation process and as many performance hiccups as possible. Mark Cerny in The Road to PS5 video explains this. On current consoles, as you update the game the performance can end up suffering somewhat due to files installing further away than optimal, which increases HDD seek times. A good patch simply can't add onto the current data as HDD seek times need to be low - therefore entire sections of the games files need to be restructured in a way that fits into the developers loading time goals.

Instead of releasing a patch that restructures and installs the update, which could take hours, Infinity Ward and many other developers choose to restructure the update before its released ready for replacing the games files. This does mean updates will be much larger than they should be, but it removes the annoying installation/file restructuring process from the user. It also prevents any major file corruption, just imagine if you experienced a power cut whilst the game was restructuring itself? It would cause major file corruption and the game would likely need a fresh installation. Again, these problems are eliminated in next-gen consoles.

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