Modern Warfare is Ruining My Hard Drive
Like many Call of Duty fans, I found myself eagerly awaiting Modern Warfare’s release. The updated graphics, the detailed animations, the stunning sound design, and the gritty new story all hinted that this game was going to be something special, a true gem after so many polished lumps of coal. What I didn’t realise, however, was that this innovation would come at a surprisingly hefty cost.
Unwrapping the game on release day, I found more or less what I expected; a lengthy data transfer from disc to hard drive took a few hours to slog through, followed by a day-one update of… 50 GB? Surely that couldn’t be right. Ah, how naive I was then. It turns out that a great deal of the data required to actually run Modern Warfare wasn’t shipped on the disc at all, coming instead as part of this 50 GB update. If you didn’t have an internet connection, you wouldn’t really be able to play the game you paid good money for at all; two thirds of it, in fact, were only accessible after downloading massive amounts of information. Two and a half months down the line I have yet to even attempt Special Ops, one of my favourite old-school modes, because I just can’t face downloading the multiple “add-on” packs necessary to run it.
Okay, fine, whatever. You’re warned by labels on the box when you buy it, “this game requires an internet connection”. Nearly all games do now, if you want the most polished experience; the kind of experience where bugs are squashed nearly as soon as they crop up, where multiplayer is continually re-balanced to keep things fair, and where free content updates are well on their way to becoming the norm. But Modern Warfare still manages to be different. It still manages to be worse.
A few months ago, I had six AAA games on my 500 GB hard drive, three of which I was finished with and three of which I was still working my way through. I had to delete two games to make space for Modern Warfare’s initial install and update (equalling ~100 GB), and a series of “quality of life” updates in the following week forced me to delete a third. Then, blissfully, nothing. Some very minor updates to balance a few horrendously broken weapons, but nothing earth-shattering. As it turns out, this was just the calm before the storm. The calm before… the Season One update. *shudders*
Following in the footsteps of other competitive games like Overwatch and Fortnite, Activision decided to split Modern Warfare’s competitive online multiplayer into seasons; each new season introduces different unlockable cosmetics and weapons, new maps, new modes, and more. What does that mean in the context of this article? Huge f**king updates, that’s what.
The initial Season One launch needed a lot of space (about 26 GB), which was just enough to necessitate deleting yet another game from my hard drive. Fine, I thought to myself, when I eventually get tired of COD I can reinstall Monster Hunter. I saw it as an irritating, but temporary, sacrifice. At least I was getting high-quality content, and what’s more, I was getting it for free. How naive, to think that would be the end of it.
As it turns out, Armageddon was approaching. I’m not able to play games every day, but whenever I did manage to load up Modern Warfare, there was another update to install. And because of the way these updates were implemented, often replicating large chunks of existing information, each one asked me to clear space on my hard drive; in one such instance, an update of supposedly 2 GB required me to clear 30 GB worth of space. Desperate to keep my two remaining games installed, I started deleting old save data, then ancient screenshots, then indie games (some of which numbered only a few megabytes in size). This might have sufficed for one or two updates, but I couldn’t stand up to the torrent Activision was levelling against me. After an absolutely harrowing internal debate, I was eventually forced to delete GTA V, a game that I’ve had installed for upwards of four years and invested hundreds of hours in.
It got so bad that I convinced myself Activision was behind some kind of conspiracy; that maybe they were deliberately inflating rapid-fire updates with replicated information in an effort to edge the competition off of players’ consoles. I envisioned the future of console gaming, with players caught in the crossfire of a sort of game development Cold War, as each company tried to dominate the market by bloating their game as much as possible… Okay, I realise that in the moment, I may have been carried away by my imagination. However, I can’t let it slide that in a matter of two months, Activision managed to force every other AAA game off my hard drive; and worse, they made me complicit. I enjoyed playing Modern Warfare, and I was undeniably willing to delete other games to make it happen. But I shouldn’t have had to.
I can only hope that this is a problem specific to the end of a console cycle; developers are pushing the boundaries of what consoles can handle, and as a result games are literally outgrowing the hardware they’re built for. Maybe it’s ungrateful to think that free content and constant improvements wouldn’t come with a trade-off. But whether this is the case or not, my entire experience with Modern Warfare has been forever tainted by the trouble it causes me every time I try to load it up again.
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