Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s file size is even larger on PS5 and Xbox Series X – The Verge

Activision has detailed the file sizes of its upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, releasing across existing consoles and next-gen hardware on November 13th. And in keeping with tradition, the game is massive. Another source of pain is that for buyers of the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, the game will take up roughly an additional 40GB of space on your new solid state drive.

Here’s the full breakdown of file sizes across platforms:

• PlayStation 4: 95GB
• PlayStation 5: 133GB
• Xbox One: 93GB
• Xbox Series X/S: 136GB

Call of Duty has become a notoriously storage-intensive game since the Modern Warfare reboot in fall of last year, and it was only made worse by the addition of the Warzone battle royale mode that launched back in March, adding tens more gigabytes to the overall footprint of the game. Currently, Modern Warfare with Warzone combined totals more than 173GB on my PS4 Pro, and that’s with the campaign uninstalled.

The same appears to be true of Black Ops Cold War, although now players of the next-gen version will have to account for that added bump in file size for what is likely texture packs and other graphical improvements that take advantage of the more powerful chipsets in the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Both consoles are shipping with NVMe SSDs, but Sony’s is slightly smaller than Microsoft’s 1TB model at just 825GB.

While we don’t know exactly how much free space either console will allow for game installs after system files and other mandatory data, Black Ops Cold War will undoubtedly take up a healthy chunk of your system storage regardless of platform. According to a Canadian Redditor who got their hands on an early Xbox Series S console thanks to what appears to be an early shipping mistake, that device’s smaller 512GB SSD contains only 364GB of free space for game installs — meaning the new Call of Duty would take up a whopping 37 percent. And images of system information on PS5 review kits that leaked on Twitter show Sony’s system with slightly more than 667GB of free space for game installs.

There is some good news — for PC players. Activision disclosed today in the same blog post that the studios developing the game have managed to cut down the PC file size from a staggering 250GB with Nvidia RTX enabled down to 125GB. The standard install has also shrunk from 175GB to 82GB, while the multiplayer-only portion of the game is down to 35GB from 50GB.

Activision hasn’t disclosed how it intends to manage Warzone as a separate game mode once Black Ops Cold War launches, or whether the two titles will be bundled similar to the current setup with Modern Warfare. But it’s likely the battle royale mode, once integrated into the latest game at some point, will add even more to the overall file size of the whole package.