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In an announcement that's sure to please the fanbase, Activision has said that Call of Duty Vanguard won't take up nearly as much space on your hard drive as previous games in the series.
The company announced the news in a tweet on Call of Duty's official Twitter page, stating that Vanguard's install size at launch would be "significantly below previous Call of Duty releases". According to Activision, this is due to "new on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen consoles and PC hard drive disk space".
Good news for hard drives everywhere: #Vanguard’s install size at launch will be significantly below previous #CallOfDuty releases.
New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space 💥 pic.twitter.com/oYZoyIDTuO
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) October 26, 2021
While the situation for last-gen consoles is unclear, it's certainly a pleasing sight for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC users hoping to play through more than a couple of games at once on their devices.
This is important when you consider not only the size of recent Call of Duty games at launch, but also how they've grown across their tenure alongside Call of Duty's battle royale mode, Warzone. When Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War was released, it took up around 100GB of space depending upon what platform players owned the game on. However, with each new season of content that its developers have dropped, the game's file size has continued to grow – expanding from its initial size greatly. Having this year's COD installed alongside Warzone, then, demands a huge chunk of a console's hard drive space.
Although an announcement stating that Vanguard's launch size will be significantly smaller than other recent games in the franchise is something to celebrate, players may still want to consider that this will likely increase over time. For more on Call of Duty Vanguard, make sure to check out a behind-the-scenes look at the new zombies mode, and the campaign's story trailer.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.