As confirmed by Activision, the first mid-season major update of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Warzone, called Season 1 Reloaded, is now set to commence on January 8. In general, the patch marks the halfway point in the first season of the game, but the gaming community is more concerned about hardware requirements than new content. From the early rumors of pre-load file sizes, it appears that players will need to make sweeping digital clean-ups to accommodate one of the biggest updates in the recent history of the franchise.
This patch does promise to deliver quite the package, including new multiplayer maps, new modes, and an update to the current arsenal of weapons. But it seems the technical overhead to integrate these assets into the current Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 ecosystem is just getting to be too much for standard console or PC storage. For many of the veteran gamers, this ever-burgeoning file size has become a point of contention that comes back to haunt their backs even if it means deleting other titles just to keep one active shooter on their drives.
To prevent the bottlenecks on the launch date, Activision had already allowed some platforms to pre-load this. This enables users to download most of the data ahead of the Jan 8 deadline to ensure that the software initializes as soon as the servers are up. With these optimizations, however, the weight of this download is adding to the trend among the AAA development community whereby high-fidelity assets and uncompressed audio files are driving gargantuan installation footprints that far exceed the storage offered by base-level hardware.
As Season 1 Reloaded fast approaches, the question remains whether the quality of the new maps and the balancing of the weapon tuning can redeem such heavy storage. The competitive meta is expected to go through a major shift after this update, which gives players days to clear a number of gigabytes so that they can continue with the fight. Whether this update can keep such unsustainable standards for the rest of Black Ops 7 lifecycle is yet to be seen, but for now, the hard drive is the first battlefield players have to win.
