Name of Responsibility has change into an absolute arduous drive hog in recent times, with 2023’s entry managing to eat over 200GB of storage in some instances. That every one could be about to vary, nevertheless, as Activision has introduced main modifications to the best way it will be handing installs with this yr’s Black Ops 6, promising “smaller and extra customised downloads” in consequence.
Activision shared the information in a put up on its Name of Responsibility weblog, explaining its optimisation work will start with a revamp of “the expertise previously often called Name of Responsibility HQ”. This revamp is ready to roll out over the course of a number of updates forward of Black Ops 6’s October launch, and can guarantees to introduce a streamlined interface, direct entry to video games, extra management over downloads, and expanded texture streaming expertise to scale back file sizes.
A primary replace to reorganise sport content material arrives on twenty first August. Then, following Black Ops 6’s open beta on thirtieth August, a brand new consumer interface and different “remaining updates” are scheduled for mid-October. After these “bigger preliminary updates”, Activision says future Name of Responsibility downloads will lower in dimension and present recordsdata will take up much less area on gamers’ gadget.
Key to those plans is the choice to decouple Name of Responsibility: Warzone from different titles, that means it will now not be put in by default. As an alternative, at any time when gamers buy an annual Name of Responsibility title, they will solely be required to put in its recordsdata – however they’ll “decide in” to a Warzone set up throughout that course of, or obtain it individually at a future level.
Moreover, gamers may have new choices the place Name of Responsibility’s expanded texture streaming tech is worried. Activision says its new capabilities imply it might probably “cycle content material that’s much less continuously utilized by gamers to a streaming cache, avoiding the necessity to obtain it on to your gadget’s storage”. And as soon as the tech is launched, gamers can select between Optimised streaming, which provides high-fidelity graphical high quality on the expense of upper web bandwidth utilization, or minimal streaming, which reduces graphical high quality and bandwidth necessities.
Activision says the primary replace gamers might want to obtain as a part of these modifications is a “massive one”, however will in the end see Name of Responsibility’s footprint lower as a consequence of its file optimisations. The writer additionally notes this preliminary replace will arrive for PlayStation 5 gamers throughout 4 separate downloads “as a consequence of variations in file organisation”. There’s extra element in Activision’s weblog, however the takeaway is an easy one. “Because of these updates,” the corporate writes, “Black Ops 6 can be a smaller obtain at launch than Name of Responsibility: Trendy Warfare 3.”
Name of Responsibility: Black Ops 6 launches for PS5, PS4, Xbox Collection X/S, Xbox One, PC, and sure tiers of Sport Cross on twenty fifth October. And should you’re interested in this yr’s Zombies mode, developer Treyarch has been sharing preliminary particulars over the previous couple of weeks.
