APRIL 2020 PCWorld 29free-to-play. Modern Warfare owners can
launch it from within the usual client, but
anyone can download Warzone direct from
Battle.net.
And you should, so long as you’re still
interested in a battle royale circa 2020—and
have friends who are interested as well.
HURRY UP AND WAIT
Be warned, it might take a bit to download.
It’s been a long time since I played Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare (go.pcworld.com/
mdwf), and so while I’d heard the griping
about enormous patch sizes, this is the first
time I’ve come in direct contact. As it turns
out, I could have downloaded the standalone
version of Warzone just as easily as updating
Modern Warfare. Total update size? Over
115GB.
This is absolutely ridiculous. That’s a tenth
of my monthly bandwidth cap, not for a new
game but for a single
update. Even if I’d kept
Modern Warfare up-to-
date, Warzone still
would’ve necessitated a
22GB install. Apparently
Modern Warfare now
takes up 163GB of my 1TB
SSD, an entire fifth of the
drive. I don’t know what’s
up with this engine, that it
requires such absurd
patch sizes, but it’s
unsustainable.
And what’s even more frustrating is that
Call of Duty’s gotten worse over the years. I
wrote about the problem of ballooning
installs in early 2017, and specifically cited
Call of Duty as a model for the future. Back
then, the games were still on Steam and you
could easily install and uninstall pieces of it at
will. Only playing Warzone? Keep that, and
jettison the campaign. Team Deathmatch and
nothing else? Launch the rest into the void.
That’s how it should be, but unfortunately
that quality-of-life feature disappeared with
the move to Battle.net. I’ve got plenty of
storage space, but not infinite.WOLF AMONG WOLVES
Anyway, once I’d waited for the 115GB
install—and then an additional ten minutes
after the game launched, while it sat and
installed shaders—I hopped into Call of...And then waiting for the shaders to install as well, after I’d already
launched the game.