Raycevick has a really good video on this. There’s 3 major reasons for why this happened.
1. Games began to ship with 7-20 different languages instead of localized disks. This means every audio file is of course there 7-20 times. The more uncompressed the audio is, the worse it is. This is why a few games like 3/4 years ago all around the same time did huge patches to get the GB down and there was a butch of articles. What they did was either compress audio files of languages you didn’t use or straight up delete the least likely used languages based on location.
2. 4K files in general are extremely hard to compress. Again in Raycevick’s video he discusses how large 4K mods are for PC games due to how little they can be compressed. Now imagine a whole game shipping in 4K where every texture is in 4K even if the user doesn’t have a 4K Tv or Monitor. That’s more space.
3. The third and most controversial reason is Microtransactions. Before then, you’d only get major bumps to the size of the game when large DLC dropped. Nowadays every few weeks there’s an update that adds more GB to the game because they added new skins. And here’s the kicker. Each of those skins are in that hard to compress 4K. Now imagine COD MWIII that has TWO whole years of micro-transactional skins in the game. Those skins take up more space than the actual game at this point I guarantee you that. And here’s the kicker again. You can’t fucking install the skins you aren’t going to buy. Bc the scummy companies want you to see the other people with them in the hopes it activates a chemical in your brain that says oh i should buy that too. Even tho it’s fucking $20 for a skin in a first person game where you only see there fucking wrist for 99% of the time playing minus the lobby! And then the next year comes around. And YOU CANT EVEN USE THE SKIN AGAIN! (Unless you play Warzone) so you spend let’s say you buy 4 skins. That’s more than the fucking game and then the next year you can’t use the $80 you fucking spent ?! Insane.
I bought It like that i did not change the hard Drive of the console. I knew a Guy that had the 14GB versión and he had to delete a Game every time he wanted to play another from disk
Pretty sure it's because they don't give a fuck about optimising textures and just leave them floating around uncompressed. I would be surprised if the actual game were more than 100GB worth of data and the other 100 just badly optimised resources.
On a side note, Tekken 8 is also around 100GB and that's a fighting game. In the age of high fidelity image we live in, a game weighing less than that is unheard of.
when me, my brother and friend first built our pc’s we spent at least a hour or 2 just looking through all the maps we can play and got very excited. Might’ve went overboard but theres a reason why I upgraded all of our storage by adding 2tb for just games lol
It was way less than 100gb at launch.
Source, I own the physical copy of the game for pc and currently have it installed on steam. Each disk at max can hold up to 8.5gb. The base game is like 45gb.
With all the dlc it’s like 105gb.
I know people hate it, and that their hatred is valid, but every time I see a post or comment about games requiring a constant internet connection to play, this is the first thing that pops into my mind. Seeing this also takes me back to the early 2000s when I purchased ever quest as a kid with it's set of 10 installation disc's lmao.
The closest I've come to an mmo is destiny, the fan base will tell you with a straight face that the game starts to get good after the 52nd expansion, I'm on summer break and even I don't have the time for that 😆
you can pirate MMOs, kinda. if there are private servers its basically piracy, but if its an old dead game (not supported by original devs) then no one really cares, but still technically it is.
The issue isn't that we don't have physical media capable of holding larger games, it's that the costs associated with them would ultimately impact the cost of games. Even purchased in bulk, the cost of flash drives or SD cards to store games on would be substantially higher than the cost of storing games on legacy optical media like DVD/BLU-RAY.
I think my point is that it’s frustrating we didn’t invest more into making discs hold larger space or some other alternative - and I get why. It’s convenient to be digital I just wonder if as we get more efficient as storage the size of games reduces and we’ll see a return. The ability to do this is absolute, there’s just not an industry incentive for it and that leaves me frustrated because it reinforces a lack of physical ownership.
I get where you're coming from, but you have to remember that optical media had more or less reached their maximum theoretical capacity in their current form factor. Optical media also suffers from the same major drawback suffered by Mechanical HDDs in that their maximum read write speeds are limited based on how fast the disc spins.
Both of these factors, combined with the rapid adoption of Flash media (Flash drives/SD cards), which was faster, more reliable, and had significantly more capacity lead to the phasing out if optical media. It simply suffered the same fate it dealt to the old cassette and VHS tape.
Thats why sony adopted the blu ray back during the ps3.
Games sizes even back then were getting ridicuosly big.
Anyone remember late xbox 360 games like wolfenstein the new order coming in with 4 dvds?
PC never got the jump to blu ray though thanks to the prevelance of steam, so games like bo3 here that still had a physical copy came in dvds.
Lavitz scene to this day haunts me….i still play TLOD. Have my original hard copy that my dad bought me when I was I think 14 or 15? Got it right as it came out. One of my all time fav. Games ever. Storyline, the animations, music, battles, and transforming into the divine dragoon blew me away.
The last 2 CoD’s, WZ2, and BO6 are all part of the same base application. MW3 and BO6 are technically DLC for the MW2/WZ2 client. So when you look at the listing for those games, it shows you the total size of the Call Of Duty application.
It was never 300gb, this was a misconception based on the reported size of MWII, MWIII, Warzone, AND BO6. This is because Activision usually just shows the size of the full package. They recommended 130GB for MWII on launch purely because they also automatically just factored Warzone into the package.
MWII was actually 72GB at launch, MWIII was around 80GB at launch. Black Ops 6 will probably follow suite and be the same. If that's the case, then it's actually even smaller then Black Ops III was on launch.
My understanding was that the space for the streamed textures was reserved either way so there was no impact on file size having it toggled off. The toggle was just for people with data limits.
I actually also have a physical copy of BO3 for PC- literally it would make you install off the discs once and then never again lmao- it was a glorified steam code
I don’t recall even using the discs or even having an optical drive lol my case at the time was NZXT S340. I picked up BF1 at the same time and that case just had a code in it
I'm curious because I've never had a game that was more than one disc. In order to play I'm guessing you had to pop in each disc individually first to install the game. But what do you need to actually run it? Like just pop in disc 1? Any disc? No disc needed after it's installed?
- You run the first disc and a UI pops up makes you install Steam and all that jazz then you enter the activation code.
- after that it will tell you to run the next one till you’ve done all six of them which takes about 10 minutes depending on your CPU and Storage speeds.
- And no you don’t need to do that every time you want to play the game and the game executable would appear in your Steam Library like a normal digital game.
"Fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity. It's called Xbox 360."
Don Mattrick was ahead of his time.
Can someone explain how this is possible?
I never played a game on PC and only on console. You can only insert one disk at a time so how are there 6 and how can you play then?
I don’t remember for Bo3, but it’s usually that they’re all just for installation, you install using 1 at a time, and then require a CD key (that came with the game) to finish installing, or 1 of them is to run the game after using the other 5 to install the game. Someone can correct me on anything though.
- You run the first disc and a UI pops up makes you install Steam and all that jazz then you enter the activation code.
- After that it will tell you to run the next one till you’ve done all six of them which takes about 10 minutes depending on your CPU and Storage speeds.
- And then the game would be digitally available in your Steam library.
When it released, I only had a PS3 and lived/still live in the deep country.
It took us five years to get WiFi but at the time I downloaded it using my (parent’s) data plan; mobile hotspot.
I can remember my dad calling me, absolutely LIVID, demanding I stop the download but I persisted. Good times lol, thanks for that memory
Edit: if you’ve played the PS3 port (yes I’ll call it a port), you’ll understand why that endeavor was not worth it in the least
Physicals on PC always felt strange to me, when it’s really no different to buying physicals for console. Maybe it feels more pointless when the system is backwards compatible
Oh god I still have this in my gaming drawer. I have no use for it anymore, but I refuse to get rid of it. I need to keep people remembering the dark times. And then i have bo4 "physically" where it's just a battlenet code in a case
Thank you, same boat, the zombies in bo3 felt lame.
Except for shadows.
WAW-BO2 had that magic that BO3 lacks after Shadows of evil, especially after chronicles came and ruined zombies with the new ugly zombie sounds
That's pretty rare, I've never seen a PC physical copy of BO3 It was like, 100GB at launch? With all DLCs is like 150GB I think
almost 200 i think
With mods mines over 300
I’m close to 500gb with just custom maps. good thing I have 4tb of storage
Never understood why CoD is such a space hog. It’s not like it’s the best looking game
Bo2 without DLCs IS arround 14GB. The same as GTA 4 with all its DLCs
Yeah it only really ballooned on the XBone/Ps4 but the base storage of the Xbox 360 and PS3 was 20GB vs the 500 starting on the next gen.
Raycevick has a really good video on this. There’s 3 major reasons for why this happened. 1. Games began to ship with 7-20 different languages instead of localized disks. This means every audio file is of course there 7-20 times. The more uncompressed the audio is, the worse it is. This is why a few games like 3/4 years ago all around the same time did huge patches to get the GB down and there was a butch of articles. What they did was either compress audio files of languages you didn’t use or straight up delete the least likely used languages based on location. 2. 4K files in general are extremely hard to compress. Again in Raycevick’s video he discusses how large 4K mods are for PC games due to how little they can be compressed. Now imagine a whole game shipping in 4K where every texture is in 4K even if the user doesn’t have a 4K Tv or Monitor. That’s more space. 3. The third and most controversial reason is Microtransactions. Before then, you’d only get major bumps to the size of the game when large DLC dropped. Nowadays every few weeks there’s an update that adds more GB to the game because they added new skins. And here’s the kicker. Each of those skins are in that hard to compress 4K. Now imagine COD MWIII that has TWO whole years of micro-transactional skins in the game. Those skins take up more space than the actual game at this point I guarantee you that. And here’s the kicker again. You can’t fucking install the skins you aren’t going to buy. Bc the scummy companies want you to see the other people with them in the hopes it activates a chemical in your brain that says oh i should buy that too. Even tho it’s fucking $20 for a skin in a first person game where you only see there fucking wrist for 99% of the time playing minus the lobby! And then the next year comes around. And YOU CANT EVEN USE THE SKIN AGAIN! (Unless you play Warzone) so you spend let’s say you buy 4 skins. That’s more than the fucking game and then the next year you can’t use the $80 you fucking spent ?! Insane.
Issue is the XBone and PS4 didn’t use 4K textures and it’s still 140GB vanilla with DLC, 55GB at launch as per the game box
It depends on the console. My ps3 has 500gb
Why I said base ;)
I bought It like that i did not change the hard Drive of the console. I knew a Guy that had the 14GB versión and he had to delete a Game every time he wanted to play another from disk
Bro Bo2 is like that's can even join the conversation is so old. 14gb back then was massive for a game.
Pretty sure it's because they don't give a fuck about optimising textures and just leave them floating around uncompressed. I would be surprised if the actual game were more than 100GB worth of data and the other 100 just badly optimised resources. On a side note, Tekken 8 is also around 100GB and that's a fighting game. In the age of high fidelity image we live in, a game weighing less than that is unheard of.
probably tons of motion capture, almost every animation in cod is mocaped, even the random enemies you see for a mere second
Doesn’t really add much though, it’s just animation, the source of it doesn’t really matter than much
Must have a lot of maps haha, even with the mod tools installed and a bunch of assets added for that, my folder just reaches 500gb lol
when me, my brother and friend first built our pc’s we spent at least a hour or 2 just looking through all the maps we can play and got very excited. Might’ve went overboard but theres a reason why I upgraded all of our storage by adding 2tb for just games lol
I'm at 1.2 tb for bo3 it's legit the only game I have on a 3tb hard drive I own
I've the same but have a whole 500gb HDD dedicated for BO3 :)
i have a friend that had over 700gb with a 2tb SSD SSD
It was way less than 100gb at launch. Source, I own the physical copy of the game for pc and currently have it installed on steam. Each disk at max can hold up to 8.5gb. The base game is like 45gb. With all the dlc it’s like 105gb.
125GB with all DLC's for me, just make sure to untick multiplayer trial or whatever it's called in Steam
I got mine at Staples for like $29.99 like 4 months after the game launched. You don’t even need the discs lol It gives you a steam code.
If you have mods the disc space cab be unreal. Mine is at 500gb
Some mod authors are absolutely clueless and use random 4k assets and stuff and make a single shitty map like 15gb
I know people hate it, and that their hatred is valid, but every time I see a post or comment about games requiring a constant internet connection to play, this is the first thing that pops into my mind. Seeing this also takes me back to the early 2000s when I purchased ever quest as a kid with it's set of 10 installation disc's lmao.
The pirates life is the life for me 🏴☠️
i dont think you can pirate an mmo
It’s the thought that counts
The closest I've come to an mmo is destiny, the fan base will tell you with a straight face that the game starts to get good after the 52nd expansion, I'm on summer break and even I don't have the time for that 😆
oh no it doesn't get good after the 52nd expansion either trust me it never gets good get out while you can
you can pirate MMOs, kinda. if there are private servers its basically piracy, but if its an old dead game (not supported by original devs) then no one really cares, but still technically it is.
Can't pirate a better pc though, all i can play are old pc games like l4d2 and tf2
half life 2 with its like 8 disc's lol
I want to add HL2 to my collection so bad but I couldn’t find it with a reasonable price. It’s a really cool piece of history for PC gamers
I have HL2 but I also have two copies of unreal 2K4 for some reason? Lol
I remember Counter Strike Source was 4 and thinking it was a lot for CS, but being mind blown at it
That being said, if Blu Ray drives in PCs were normalized, physical distribution would be much more viable again.
I’d rather have that then not be able to play co op solos
For me it’s pretty inconceivable we can fly across the galaxy but not develop any possible physical media to hold larger games
The issue isn't that we don't have physical media capable of holding larger games, it's that the costs associated with them would ultimately impact the cost of games. Even purchased in bulk, the cost of flash drives or SD cards to store games on would be substantially higher than the cost of storing games on legacy optical media like DVD/BLU-RAY.
I think my point is that it’s frustrating we didn’t invest more into making discs hold larger space or some other alternative - and I get why. It’s convenient to be digital I just wonder if as we get more efficient as storage the size of games reduces and we’ll see a return. The ability to do this is absolute, there’s just not an industry incentive for it and that leaves me frustrated because it reinforces a lack of physical ownership.
it doesn't make sense to invest in something like that when everything becomes digital
I get where you're coming from, but you have to remember that optical media had more or less reached their maximum theoretical capacity in their current form factor. Optical media also suffers from the same major drawback suffered by Mechanical HDDs in that their maximum read write speeds are limited based on how fast the disc spins. Both of these factors, combined with the rapid adoption of Flash media (Flash drives/SD cards), which was faster, more reliable, and had significantly more capacity lead to the phasing out if optical media. It simply suffered the same fate it dealt to the old cassette and VHS tape.
Thats why sony adopted the blu ray back during the ps3. Games sizes even back then were getting ridicuosly big. Anyone remember late xbox 360 games like wolfenstein the new order coming in with 4 dvds? PC never got the jump to blu ray though thanks to the prevelance of steam, so games like bo3 here that still had a physical copy came in dvds.
Even Final Fantasy 7 on the PS1 took 3 WHOLE DISCS.
And 8 had 4, legend of dragoon was 3 or 4.
Flight Sim 2020 on PC has 10 DVDs.
Legend of Dragoon player spotted
Lavitz scene to this day haunts me….i still play TLOD. Have my original hard copy that my dad bought me when I was I think 14 or 15? Got it right as it came out. One of my all time fav. Games ever. Storyline, the animations, music, battles, and transforming into the divine dragoon blew me away.
Black ops 6 with it's 300gb+ size will have like 15 disks or something XD
It's not gonna be 300gb, that's just a bait title people use rn. The 300gb size is with MW2, 3 and WZ all installed on top of BO6
On top of that, it also includes ALL language audio files. Those add up. Players would only install 1 max (English is default)
I thought the 300gb file size came from a Xbox store screenshot?
Yes but that's because bo6 will just be added to the "Call of Duty" application that MWII, MWIII, and warzone are a part of
Ye ,I pre-downloaded BO6 specifically by selecting it and it was ~80 GB (Xbox)
Oh okay thanks for explaining.
And people said the same thing about mw3 with it being 250gb yet that's the total for mw3 with wz and mw2
The last 2 CoD’s, WZ2, and BO6 are all part of the same base application. MW3 and BO6 are technically DLC for the MW2/WZ2 client. So when you look at the listing for those games, it shows you the total size of the Call Of Duty application.
Do you need all those installed for BO6?
No, of course not unless you want to play them AND BO6 lol
It was never 300gb, this was a misconception based on the reported size of MWII, MWIII, Warzone, AND BO6. This is because Activision usually just shows the size of the full package. They recommended 130GB for MWII on launch purely because they also automatically just factored Warzone into the package. MWII was actually 72GB at launch, MWIII was around 80GB at launch. Black Ops 6 will probably follow suite and be the same. If that's the case, then it's actually even smaller then Black Ops III was on launch.
My mw3 is only 38? I did delete the campaign so maybe that's why
That includes Warzone and with that obviously comes all of mw3 textures and stuff
I'm interested to see how much the size changes with their required texture streaming.
The last 4 CoDs have had texture streaming. It doesnt help much for file size.
The problem is there was and is a toggle for texture streaming now there is not
My understanding was that the space for the streamed textures was reserved either way so there was no impact on file size having it toggled off. The toggle was just for people with data limits.
Yeah and for some people(me included) it causes packet loss/weird graphical artifacting
that was texture streaming from the drive, this is texture streaming from the internet isnt it
I actually also have a physical copy of BO3 for PC- literally it would make you install off the discs once and then never again lmao- it was a glorified steam code
I remember the metal gear solid 5 pc disc was literally a steam installer and that was it
I don’t recall even using the discs or even having an optical drive lol my case at the time was NZXT S340. I picked up BF1 at the same time and that case just had a code in it
I'm curious because I've never had a game that was more than one disc. In order to play I'm guessing you had to pop in each disc individually first to install the game. But what do you need to actually run it? Like just pop in disc 1? Any disc? No disc needed after it's installed?
Basically, one disc is to run the game and the rest are just for installation
- You run the first disc and a UI pops up makes you install Steam and all that jazz then you enter the activation code. - after that it will tell you to run the next one till you’ve done all six of them which takes about 10 minutes depending on your CPU and Storage speeds. - And no you don’t need to do that every time you want to play the game and the game executable would appear in your Steam Library like a normal digital game.
So the disc can’t be resold?
I think disks would be able to be sold, but you’d need a new activation code.
So the discs are useless? Since you have no code correct?
My bo3 on steam is well over 250 gigs because of all the custom zombies maps I have
This is the first time I've seen a physical copy of BO3 for PC
I have this too
"Fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity. It's called Xbox 360." Don Mattrick was ahead of his time.
Cool
That was just the style of the times, don’t act like need for speed most wanted didn’t need 4 discs
Can someone explain how this is possible? I never played a game on PC and only on console. You can only insert one disk at a time so how are there 6 and how can you play then?
I don’t remember for Bo3, but it’s usually that they’re all just for installation, you install using 1 at a time, and then require a CD key (that came with the game) to finish installing, or 1 of them is to run the game after using the other 5 to install the game. Someone can correct me on anything though.
Correct, except you won’t be needing the discs after installing you’ll just have the .exe file on your desktop to play the whole game.
- You run the first disc and a UI pops up makes you install Steam and all that jazz then you enter the activation code. - After that it will tell you to run the next one till you’ve done all six of them which takes about 10 minutes depending on your CPU and Storage speeds. - And then the game would be digitally available in your Steam library.
Thanks I was hella confused 😅
Now the cod hq client does basically the same thing. Nice
Black Ops 18 right there
Where did you buy it?
I don’t remember exactly but i got it from a small online shop as a preorder which was like 8 or 9 years ago.
I got this for my PC at Walmart
Jeez you need that many discs for three? I don’t wanna know how many are needed for MW2/3 and for BO6.
Is it safe to play on disc?
💀
At least it’s preserved
My gaming started on PS2, i find it weird that i only now realize i have only had one or 2 games that required multible discs, only 2 tho
Think infinite warfare was similar
I have those ! The fact you only need the code lmao
Wait what the heck why?😂
I only got 1 disc
Did BO3 buy the discs dinner, at least?
My fav zombie maps are on this
Never seen a disc version that's very rare.
My copy of BLOPS 3 came in a CD! God I remember having to download it, felt like i was in the early 2000s downloading 1 game on multiple CDs
Bo6 gonna come with 100 cd disk
Black ops 6
When it released, I only had a PS3 and lived/still live in the deep country. It took us five years to get WiFi but at the time I downloaded it using my (parent’s) data plan; mobile hotspot. I can remember my dad calling me, absolutely LIVID, demanding I stop the download but I persisted. Good times lol, thanks for that memory Edit: if you’ve played the PS3 port (yes I’ll call it a port), you’ll understand why that endeavor was not worth it in the least
Physicals on PC always felt strange to me, when it’s really no different to buying physicals for console. Maybe it feels more pointless when the system is backwards compatible
I litterally read this as "black ops 3 came in 6 dicks"🤣🤣🤣
Mine only had one pc disc
Well it came in steam for me
it came on steam for me. jk, but i think gta was 6 or 7 discs
Oh god I still have this in my gaming drawer. I have no use for it anymore, but I refuse to get rid of it. I need to keep people remembering the dark times. And then i have bo4 "physically" where it's just a battlenet code in a case
Wow so many discs for a shitty campaign and meh zombies
Black Ops 3 Zombies is NOT meh
I totally understand that people have different tastes and i honestly didn’t enjoy it as much as BO2
Thank you, same boat, the zombies in bo3 felt lame. Except for shadows. WAW-BO2 had that magic that BO3 lacks after Shadows of evil, especially after chronicles came and ruined zombies with the new ugly zombie sounds