Cartridges and discs used to be used to get the latest games, but that has changed as downloads have become more convenient and reliable. But some people prefer the sure thing: a physical copy, so they can play offline or with a bad connection. To them, Activision says “qq”: the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II disc is actually just a link to a 150 gigabyte download.
Now, to be fair, games of this size don’t scale perfectly to even high-capacity Blu-ray discs, which, for distribution purposes, max out at around 50 gigs. Not that we haven’t seen multi-disc games before (I never completed Final Fantasy VIII because the final disc got scratched…one day, Edea), but Activision clearly decided it wasn’t worth penalty in this case.
That’s a bit of a shame, because there are people all over the world who for one reason or another would prefer a physical copy of the game. There’s the ever-present fear that its digital access could disappear for some reason, or maybe one has a patchy connection – a common problem in the military, I understand. Even those with a decent internet connection could find themselves uncomfortably close to transfer caps if they start their month with a 150 gig binge (even more once Warzone is added).
It’s gotten harder for people to make that choice – still perfectly valid for TV and movies, if you’re willing to wait a bit, by the way – but in general they were able to get it working, if not entirely updated and optimized version of the game that only works when you insert the disc.
That’s not the case with CoD:MWII, as players who pre-ordered the game and received the disc discovered earlier. Far from having the full game on it, the disc is almost entirely empty.
This 72 megabyte application is actually just an authenticator and a shell that starts the huge download process. I would bet that most of those 72 megabytes are 4K video files of logos.
There’s even a Steelbook pre-order bonus (it’s a metal case for the disc and everything that comes with it). Players may be disappointed to find that this fancy reinforced packaging doesn’t protect anything of value.
Obviously there is great waste entailed in producing perhaps millions of records (although the numbers are probably much lower than they were before) for no reason. But waste is endemic in consumerism. The bait and switch of this one is the infuriating thing – which Activision takes the worst of both worlds.
There is literally no point in providing even a physical version of the software if none of the reasons for doing so are met by it. It’s the equivalent of the next season of Stranger Things coming on a disc that just loads Netflix and starts streaming. Why bother?
It’s worth wondering if Activision could have built a version of the game that fits on one disc at all. Given how proudly they advertised the realism of the graphics, probably not. A single unit of 4K texture, for example for a building facade or a character model, can amount to tens of megabytes, and any AAA game will have countless such textures. Meanwhile, audio and video resources also need to fit there, and they can only be compressed so far before degrading.
Chances are the team thought that while a working disc version would be theoretically possible, it wouldn’t be an adequate representation of the game they had worked so hard on. We sympathize: imagine spending all that time doing high-resolution photogrammetry of a street in Amsterdam to make it look like a Quake level.
Would the outcry if they didn’t announce a physical edition be worse than if they shipped a fake? Hard to say. At least the former takes “courage”, as Apple would no doubt put it, while the latter is just misleading and unnecessary. We may be entering an era where digital delivery is the norm, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. It was a bad way.
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