Black Ops Cold War’s File Sizes Announced on Consoles

If the PC file sizes seemed scary, it seems some console players actually managed to luck out. Black Ops Cold War is coming in at two different files sizes, but not for the reasons you immediately thought.

Yeah, okay, the game is a different size on PlayStation than it is on Xbox, but the difference there is a couple of gigabytes; nothing that should really make or break whether you pre-order one console or the other. But what does matter, is if you really should bother upgrading your console just for this game.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X are going to have marginally more space than the PS4 or Xbox One did on launch, but if you’re planning on picking up Cold War to go along with your shiny new console, you may want to invest in an external storage drive to go along with it. At a minimum 133 GB on PS5 and 136 GB on Xbox Series X, you’re looking at losing a good chunk of your total storage space for just one game.

Fans of Modern Warfare shouldn’t be surprised here, as that game has bloated to the point it won’t even fit on smaller SSD’s anymore, the fact that the game is that big is somewhat concerning, especially stacked up to the game’s size on the current generation of consoles.

Cold War will come in under 100 GB on both current generation consoles (specifically 95 GB on PS4 and 93 GB on Xbox One) and the PC storage requirements also saw a pretty big change.

For PC players who only want the multiplayer, the game’s total size will be a measly 35 GB. The full game will take 82 GB, while the full game with Ultra graphics will need a full 125 GB. For anyone keeping track at home, that’s basically half the size the game was initially reported at, and still less than the next generation of consoles.

I am by no means an optimist, but even for me this is…sketchy. You’re telling me that Activision was able to cut the file size on PC in half in a week? That can really only mean two things. One, that the game was originally going to ship at the original size for no good reason until the Internet (rightfully) threw a fit over it, or the publishing giant slammed down with so much crunch time before release that they were somehow able to make this happen.

It also brings up a question I think plenty of Call of Duty fans should be asking themselves as we move into the next generation of consoles: are higher resolution graphics really worth double the file size, especially in a franchise like Call of Duty that has had historically bad issues with net code, server issues, cheaters, hacking, and a whole slew of other problems?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone is fooling themselves when they pick up the newest installment. Modern Warfare was the biggest departure the franchise has seen from its own history by favoring realism and a new engine, and even it was plagued by plenty of problems. I just can’t imagine the average Call of Duty fan scrambling to eat up nearly a fifth of the storage on their next-gen console for 4K/60FPS performance, especially given how pricey those external drives are. I guess we’ll see.