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Activision finally has a solution for giant Call of Duty file sizes

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Soldiers fight in a shopping plaza in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
Activison

It wouldn’t be a Call of Duty launch without conversations about large file sizes, but Activision is looking to address those issues with a series of updates over the next few months. One of the biggest involves decoupling the free-to-play Warzone from the main game, which will help to make Black Ops 6 smaller than Modern Warfare 3, according to the publisher.

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While Activision hasn’t revealed game file size just yet, these new changes will be implemented starting on August 21 with Season 5 Reloaded. In a blog post published Thursday, Activision developers laid out plans to streamline textures and to encourage users to download early, but making Warzone a separate download by default will be the most impactful on file sizes. Warzone is a battle royale that’s a separate, free-to-play game, so there’s no reason to keep it tied with the latest Call of Duty main release. It’ll be available to install at any time, and players can opt to download it with Black Ops 6.

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Developers will also be rolling out new streamlined texture streaming that Activision says will cycle out older assets and content players might not use into a cache that’s not stored directly on their device. This does mean graphics might be lower quality, but a new setting called On-Demand High Quality Streaming will allow player to bypass it.

There are other planned updates being rolled out before launch, including one in mid-October that will feature a new UI. To make this all a lot easier, Activision is encouraging players to download these updates early. This process will be slightly different for PlayStation 5 players, who will get this update through four downloads.

This is great news for players who wanted to hop into one of the two beta periods. There’s one for early access from August 30-September 4, and another public open beta from September 6-9. The game is set to launch on October 25 across PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC, and will be available day one on Xbox Game Pass.

It’ll also hopefully put fears to rest that Black Ops 6 would be massive. People noticed in June that the Xbox store page listed the game as requiring a whopping 309.85GB download, which Activision had to clarify took into account Modern Warfare 2 and 3, along with Warzone and all the content packs. For reference, Modern Warfare 3 was 149GB at launch for the whole package.

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Carli Velocci
Carli Velocci
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
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