Looking forward to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3? You’d best clear out some room on your hard drive, as the install size is a stupendously large 213GB. Thankfully, that install size can be reduced as needed, according to the game’s official Twitter/X account.
The reason for the enormous file size is because of the sheer amount of content on offer with just the base game. Not only is there the full Modern Warfare 3 remaster, including the single-player campaign and multiplayer, but there’s also the item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, map files from Call of Duty: Warzone, the open world world zombies mode, and a high-resolution asset cache as well. All of that together means the game is a hefty beast, even from a fresh install. Thankfully, you can use the game’s COD HQ launcher to remove files you’re not using, using the file manager.
There’s no mention of whether you can choose to not install those files before starting the game’s download, or whether you’ll need to download and install everything before then removing what you don’t need. Hopefully it’s the former, as 213GB of free disk space is a lot to ask for many, even with the comparative affordability of SSDs these days. As a minor plus, the combined install of all of these elements will be lower than previous CoD experiences, but that’s a fairly small amount of sugar for this particular pill.
While being able to modify your install is great, it does raise further questions about the ridiculous sizes of some game installs. With a lot of games now pushing far past 100GB in size, there has to come a point where we all recognize that games are simply too large now. While it’s true that the average gamer is only really dedicating themselves to one or two games at a time, the days when you could have tens of games installed on a single hard drive is looking further and further away.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is releasing on November 10, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S.