Heavy lay the crown is a great way to describe of the Call of Duty franchise, as the first-person-shooter continues to top charts in terms of popularity, but is constantly criticized.

One of the biggest griefs players have with Call of Duty is the sheer file size it requires, which has been a problem since 2022 when the decision to couple Call of Duty: Warzone with each new Call of Duty title within what is now called the Call of Duty HQ launcher. Unfortunately, with each new update, the COD HQ launch only gained more in size, getting to the point where Call of Duty was taking up the majority of space on hard drives and SSDs.

However, that is all about to change as Call of Duty has explained in a new blog post that it will be rolling out an update on August 21 as part of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Season 5 Reloaded update that will be decoupling the download of Warzone from any Call of Duty title. Players will be able to opt-in to the Warzone download when downloading a new Call of Duty game or simply download Warzone at any point.

Additionally, new texture streaming technology is coming to Call of Duty HQ, which will reduce file sizes as players won't have to have the texture files stored locally. Instead, the textures will be streamed to a player. Players will have two options within the "On-Demand High-Quality Streaming," - Optimized (Default) and Minimal. Minimal will reduce the graphical quality of the streamed textures, reducing the required internet bandwidth. "Optimized" will increase the quality of the streamed content, but require a much wider bandwidth internet connection.

Unfortunately, all of these awesome changes to Call of Duty HQ come at a price of a large upfront download, which the team states will pave the way for an ultimately better experience, especially leading up to the release of Black Ops 6. Notably, Call of Duty explains the initial download will not permanently add the stated file size to the designated storage space that Call of Duty takes up on a device but will reorganize game files and add new tech in preparation for the user interface overhaul arriving in October. Once the download is complete, along with the file reorganization, the total file size of Call of Duty will be reduced.

PlayStation 5 players will need to tackle this update in four separate downloads.