It is straightforward to really feel nostalgic for the time when playing a new release meant cracking open a plastic box and slotting a cartridge into your console. It is even simpler when you have been watching the “download” bar crawl upwards for 3 hours. By hour 4, you are pulling your hair out.
Contact of Duty: Contemporary Warfare is exciting as hell, but it took me nicely more than 4 hours ahead of I could discover that out. The course of action for having the dang issue to run was a single little misery just after a further, a best illustration of how jagged and frustrating the set up practical experience for hugely anticipated AAA games can be.
The game, released October 25, calls for 128 GB of storage on Computer. (It functionally requires up 108 GB.) That is twice the size of Planet of Warcraft. To carve out some legroom, I uninstalled Contact of Duty: Black Ops four (80 GB), Apex Legends (40 GB), and a number of indie games on Steam that I know I’m in no way going to finish. Then, the good Contact of Duty download initiated. My laptop or computer, a gaming Computer connected by a LAN cable to extremely highly-priced world wide web, reared and fought and emitted major, sad sighs. All through the 3-hour game download, it refused to run any other game and could barely even render an whole sentence in Slack with out pauses (i.e. “the CoD file is enormous”).
It really should be no surprise to any one that some newer games are larger than some older games. A current IGN short article graphs out a 10 GB development amongst Contact of Duty games each year because 2013’s Ghosts. Prior to then, the games oscillated amongst eight and 10 GB. But Contact of Duty: Contemporary Warfare is a third bigger than Contact of Duty: Black Ops four. That is important. It is got some new stuff, of course, like crossplay amongst Computer, PS4, and Xbox A single some fresh game modes and a single-player campaign, which Black Ops four did not have. But there’s also no Zombies or battle royale mode. Is it the ray tracing? The shaders?
A tiny more than 3 hours just after hitting the “Download” button on Battle.net, Contact of Duty: Contemporary Warfare had installed—but it wasn’t pretty more than. There had been the patches. HDR assistance and a thing about utilizing NVIDIA Highlight in multiplayer matches. Some bug fixes, some major, new game modes. Downloading patches 1.03 and 1.04, more than 7 GB in total, took a further 30 minutes to an hour. Possibly if I had been the type of individual who genuinely cared about ray tracing, hour 4 of download hell would make Contact of Duty worth the wait.
When all that was accomplished, I excitedly hit “Play.” It was time to hop into some multiplayer and click heads. But wait—I had to update my drivers, the game informed me. NVIDIA did a complete weblog post about this, explaining that:
Good, NVIDIA, thanks. But when, precisely? To update my drivers, I had to launch and log into Nvidia’s proprietary software program and wait 10 minutes for the 575 MB download. Then, afterwards, Battle.net had to update. Certainly, now, it was Contact of Duty time, appropriate? The loading screen appeared, and moody music resonated.
Nope. I was prompted to make an Activision account (Why!) and log into Activision’s Battle.net account method. Then, Contact of Duty: Contemporary Warfare had a major old shaders update for me. It felt uniquely rude to hide this massive update in-game, appropriate just after I believed the bulk of the update onslaught was more than. That set up paused, jerked, and crashed about 15 minutes in. I had to close out and restart the game. (Apparently that is a recognized bug.) Many occasions more than, Contact of Duty would pause and wait for a shaders update, when once again crashing my laptop or computer.
In total, Contact of Duty: Contemporary Warfare took about 4 and a half hours to set up in close-to-perfect Computer gaming situations. Someplace inside this comedy of download errors and update bugs, I did learn a lesson: I want additional RAM if I’m gonna game in 2019.