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Games

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Enormous 309GB Download 'Not Representative of a Typical Player Install Experience' (eurogamer.net) 37

Activision has clarified Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 isn't 309GB after all -- or at least, you can download the core of it for less. From a report: This is despite Xbox's store page for the game stating that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's install size is a rather chunky 309.85 GB. This made many heads turn, because that seemed excessive. The Call of Duty team has now issued a correction with more detail. Writing on social media platform X, Activision stated the file size currently listed for Black Ops 6 "does not represent the download size or disk footprint" for its upcoming Call of Duty game.

"The sizes as shown include the full installations of Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Warzone and all relevant content packs, including all localised languages combined which is not representative of a typical player install experience," it explained, before adding: "Players will be able to download Black Ops 6 at launch without downloading any other Call of Duty titles or all of the language packs."

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Enormous 309GB Download 'Not Representative of a Typical Player Install Experience'

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  • microsoft and activision being hallmarks of crookedness...
  • by sherlocktk ( 260059 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @01:32PM (#64544257) Homepage

    This is one of my large issues with data cap. A COD update, can frequently chew through 50% or more if you have multiple gamers in a household. a "Free" game quickly costs $50 due to going over on a data allowance. I wish my ISP (COX) would get rid of it as managing the data overages for events like these is very complicated

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      This is one of my large issues with data cap. A COD update, can frequently chew through 50% or more if you have multiple gamers in a household. a "Free" game quickly costs $50 due to going over on a data allowance. I wish my ISP (COX) would get rid of it as managing the data overages for events like these is very complicated

      Data caps still exist?

      I think the issue is lazy developers here combined with the way distribution platforms work.

      Steam doesn't allow compilers to run clientside... or even an archive, so to run updates you pretty much have to replace the whole file in the repo. if that's a 40 KB XML, it's a 40 KB download for the end users... If it's as 6 GB archive it's a 6 GB download and doesn't matter if it's a 2 KB change to that file. Steam does this for security, so that they can be sure that developers aren't

    • If "multiple gamers" are the issue then a bigger problem is the platform and distribution method. Download an update on Steam and you only need to download it once, on one machine. The other gamers in the house when they hit update will pull the game files from another device on the same network.

  • Like this is pure marketing bunk in their FAQ, it's not possible to stream textures in realtime, the whole point of texture streaming is it's directly loads things as needed from disk instead of trying to keep it all in memory, but even on multi-gigabit internet you couldn't stream textures over the internet for a modern-visuals FPS game.

    Seriously this is just an enormous "...wait, you're serious!?" JJJameson moment with this release.

    • even on multi-gigabit internet you couldn't stream textures over the internet for a modern-visuals FPS game

      Sure, but only if you can't stream in real-time from a hard drive or SATA SSD. Which is possible. Game assets can be huge and this is a way of getting rid of as much loading screen as possible. And for leaving more RAM available to the game since you can "swap" back to disk when textures aren't needed.

  • by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @01:51PM (#64544327)
    Here's an idea: If your game is a bigger footprint on a 1TB drive then you can't install many other games and you can push out the competition with a large footprint. The people that suffer are the gamers. The games that are getting more and more commercial are less and less fun.
    • One big problem is texturing. In 4K, it takes a huge graphic to make a realistic looking brick wall without obvious repeating patterns. Even with ray tracing, you don't draw all the outlines and pits and grooves in the individual bricks with vector data. It would perform like trash. The tradeoff is laying huge photos on top of a loosely outlined shape. A modern Pixar movie still takes around 6-24+ hours of compute time to render a single frame. And they still use textures, only with much more detailed

      • Reading your response I'm kind of surprised they haven't already moved more to procedurally generated content. They're still making you download the exact location of each pebble in concrete or the position and angle of every blade of grass? And for that matter the faces of anonymous NPC's? It seems odd since all these things are certainly procedurally generated in the first place.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I remember back in the day some idiot journalist taking a Sony rep's word for it that the Playstation 2 would be able to procedurally generate every brick in a wall. Of course it never happened and more than two decades later it still hasn't.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Here's an idea: If your game is a bigger footprint on a 1TB drive then you can't install many other games and you can push out the competition with a large footprint. The people that suffer are the gamers. The games that are getting more and more commercial are less and less fun.

      Looks at gaming PC... Has 3.7 TB of SSD storage, 6 TB of spinning rust.

      Oh, you mean consoles.

      Looks shamefully at 2TB M2 drive on desk... Yes, I'll get round to installing it at some point, no need to remind me every six months.

    • You can't live in a world with ever improving graphics, and ever increasing storage space without expecting that to not be used to improve fidelity of games. Texturing can make a *****ing huge difference to games. How much visual fidelity are you willing to give up? Me I have quite a few TBs of space in my main gaming rig, why should I suffer because you don't want to get a decent drive?

  • Not that I'm really interested in most games, but the few (and somewhat older) I've tried to see if they're worth buying, I used repack versions if I found them.
    No online needs and especially way smaller downloads. Simply less hassle and mandatory annoyances in the same trend as pirated movies versus streaming services.
    Might even say like the difference between Linux/BSD and Windows (10/11).

    Well, we all know why the annoyances, but why can't these online game services not reach the same compression level a

  • I'm on gigabit fiber and I consider this excessive.

  • by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @02:01PM (#64544351)

    If your Internet's too slow, just buy the physical media.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      The day SOCOM for PS3 was released they had a patch the same size as the original game. Physical media is almost meaningless for online games.

      • Is it really impossible to tell I wan't being serious about buying 309GB worth of discs? I assume they don't even exist.

        • This being Slashdot, I could totally see someone saying what you said and being serious about it.

          The old game consoles' games came on cartridges... maybe modern games should be distributed on SSDs. ... Which come with postage-paid return mailers for when an update is required. ;-)

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        More of an issue than the size of the download is that they have decided all the stuff you bought for the first two games won't carry over to the third. If you want your stuff you have to buy it again.

      • You mean literally meaningless. Most physical media these days are just installers. A few years ago I was set to by the Spyro the Dragon remastered games for the PS4, until I found out most of the content isn't actually on the disc at all. Needless to say, I saved my money.

  • Downloading imagery for the whole planet takes a lot of time, and servers get bottlenecked a lot. Had to stop playing due to slow internet eventually.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why does it include the file size of unrelated games like Warzone, MW2, MW3, and their content packs? This is completely irrelevant. How did they screw this up?

    • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2024 @04:26PM (#64544777)

      My guess is DLC. They will "unlock" the content of older games so you can play in the latest shiny engine after you pay for DLC.

    • They didn't. That's the store page. Xbox store probably measures the size of all the data uploaded to it as part of the one purchasable item. i.e. If you buy BO6, the Xbox store has 309 GB of content attached to that purchase. The store doesn't know what you "need", only what the publisher has made available.

  • I wish they would simply choose an engine and give it all the maps. Especially frustrating is that I prefer the larger maps used in Invasion, but it's boring only having 2-3 maps.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday June 13, 2024 @03:43AM (#64545745)

    Freshly released games are often flaky and bug-ridden. And they cost too much. Waiting a year or two for the Deluxe GOTY Edition with all patches and a solid discount applied is usually the best strategy. Physical media versions of later editions are also a good thing and enable installation without gobbling up bandwidth.

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