Activision has heard the howls of pain every time someone tries to download a new Call of Duty game and the publisher is finally doing something about it. Players won’t have to install Warzone alongside Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 when it launches this October, drastically reducing the game’s size on PS5 and other platforms from launcher Call of Duty HQ’s current footprint of roughly 175 GB.
“As we look ahead to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, we’ve been working on ways to improve the Call of Duty experience by optimizing menu navigation and offering smaller and more customized downloads, plus other benefits for your Call of Duty library,” Activision announced in a blog post today ahead of Warzone’s upcoming season 5 Reload update. “We’ve heard your feedback, and along with our own testing and learnings, have worked to optimize the way players access and download Call of Duty. This begins by revamping the experience formerly known as Call of Duty HQ.”
The publisher is promising a more streamlined experience, direct access to games, more control over what gets downloaded, and further reduced file sizes overall. Call of Duty HQ, the popular military shooter’s current one-size-fits-all launcher, requires players to download tons of stuff they don’t want to access a new campaign or multiplayer mode and then delete the rest later. The new approach will require a big download initially starting August 21 as Activision reorganizes the Call of Duty HQ content ahead of the Black Ops 6 beta later this month on August 30, but will eventually result in players being able to install exactly what they want without eating up half of their PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S’s storage.
The biggest change is that Call of Duty Warzone, the free-to-play battle royale mode, will exist as a completely separate download from Modern Warfare III and later when it launches, Black Ops 6. Activision didn’t breakdown exactly what the file sizes will be for the games at that point, or for the initial updates players need to install to re-optimize Call of Duty HQ, but it did share how big the standalone Black Ops 6 beta will be on every platform. The biggest is 80GB on PS5 and the smallest is to 66 GB on Steam.
Players have long complained about how chaotic and ugly the Call of Duty HQ experience is, and what a pain it’s been trying to make room for ever-bigger sequels on their hard drives, especially when big new updates rivaling the size of most average games are added on top of the existing space requirements. This peaked in absurdity earlier this year when the Black Ops 6 Microsoft store page revealed a total size of 309.85 GB for the upcoming game. Activision quickly clarified that the number in question included MWII, MWIII, Blops 6, and Warzone. Thank god that come October 25 players won’t have to fiddle with any of that nonsense anymore. I’m sure it will be an incredibly smooth handoff with no further wrinkles or issues.