Call of Duty: Vanguard won't be as storage-hungry as previous entries

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Activision reckons the upcoming FPS will be 30-50% smaller on PC.

call of duty vanguard
(Image credit: Activision)

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—Activision claims 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 that Call 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".

Last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War came in at a hefty 175GB, though later updates would crunch that size down to 85GB and 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 at over 200GB of Call of Duty on 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:

  • Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - "MP Only 50GB, 175GB for all game modes"
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - 175GB
  • Call of Duty: Warzone - 175 GB 
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered - 80GB

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 is too exasperated with cheaters to protest.

Natalie Clayton
Natalie Clayton
Features Producer

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.