Call of Duty: Vanguard won’t be as storage-hungry as previous entries
Activision reckons the upcoming FPS will be 30-50% smaller on PC.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Call of Duty’s been a bit storage-hungry in recent years. But if your poor drive was sweating over the prospect of squeezing in another gargantuan shooter, rest easy—Activisionclaims this year’s entry will be significantly easier to fit on your PC.
Posting on Twitter this week, the official Call of Duty account noted thatCall of Duty: Vanguard’s base install size will be “significantly below” previous games, thanks to what the developer calls a new form of “on-demand texture streaming technology”.
Good news for hard drives everywhere: #Vanguard’s install size at launch will be significantly below previous #CallOfDuty releases. New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space 💥 pic.twitter.com/oYZoyIDTuOOctober 26, 2021
Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War came in at a hefty 175GB, though later updates wouldcrunch that size down to 85GBand give players the option to individually download segments of the game. That’s not including the extra space required for ultra graphics, mind, and once you factor in Warzone you’re looking atover 200GB of Call of Dutyon your drive.
Vanguard’s promise to cut that space requirement in half could potentially mean not only saving up to 100GB on disk space, but also a dramatic shortening of how much time and bandwidth you’ll need to download it in the first place.
Here’s the storage requirements for recent Calls of Duty, via Battle.net:
Activision hasn’t revealed exactly how big Vanguard will be at launch, mind, and I’ve reached out to Activision to ask which figure exactly the claim is referring to. But hopefully this is good news for folks who were preparing to scramble for storage space come November 5. In less exciting news, Vanguard will ship with controversial kernal-level anti-cheat—though at this point it sounds like the wider community istoo exasperated with cheaters to protest.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she’s not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it’s the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.
Black Ops 6 is wasting no time stinking up the joint with ugly skins
There is simply too much going on in Black Ops 6 Season 1
Co-op survival game Icarus is celebrating 153 consecutive weekly updates by giving you a flamethrower and a free weekend
