Hands up if your Tuesday night was ruined by the big, fuck-off update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone! Yesterday, Activision and developers Infinity Ward released a new patch for their wildly popular series, and some fans — i.e. people like me with excruciatingly slow console download speeds — were not happy. Get a load of this guy:
The titanic-sized download came in at 20.2gb on PS4 and 31gb for Xbox One. 31gb! That takes the game up to, like, 150gb in total, making other absolute units such as Red Dead Redemption 2 (99gb on PS4) and GTA V (77gb on PS4) seem positively tiny by comparison.
As you'd expect from something that would take literally 100,000,000,000 years to download back in 1998, there is a lot to unpack. You can find the official patch notes here, but the main takeaway for Modern Warfare is the new maps called Aisle 9 and Hardhat. For those only interested in Warzone, there's now a primordial Classic Battle Royale mode which features no buy stations, contracts, or Gulag — if you die, I'm sorry comrade, but that's game over. And speaking of the Gulag, there'll be new weapons added to that hellish arena, meaning you can be merked in all manner of fresh, violent ways.
In fairness to the developers, the scale of the Warzone map is astonishing, and it's not hard to understand why the file is the size that it is. After the initial outcry, Infinity Ward production director Paul Haile assured fans they were aware of the game's memory usage and were managing it. “Modern Warfare and Warzone are both massive experiences with tons of ways to play and new content being added regularly, and we are cognizant of the overall download size,” he told USGamer. "As a team we are committed to updating the game with new free content of course, but have also taken steps for overall footprint management, including a DLC pack management screen for console users. This allows players to pick and choose which DLC packs they want to keep, and remove the others to recover more space.”
Still, that statement did little to quell the opprobrium as the COD community headed for Twitter to blow off some steam. See some of the best memes and reactions below.
