Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4's Day One Patch Is Basically Just The Game

Gamers have been quite vocal these days about the surge in day-one patches for AAA games. It started with a few megabytes to fix a few glitches or catch a few bugs that were missed before the game went gold, but it's started to become a tradition now of having to download multiple gigabytes worth of data once you boot the game up, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 takes it to the next level. The patch is almost the size of the game.

As revealed over on the Activision support page, Black Ops 4's day-one patch is 50GB in size, which is massive all on its own. In fact, it's about the average size of single-sided Blu-ray disc, which is typically 50GB.

Now the patch size alone is ginormous, but the real kicker is that you won't be able to play most of the game without it. Even if you install the game from disc, which is 55GB, the day-one patch is more than 90% of the total disc installation size. There's only 5Gb that isn't apparently being replaced with the day-one patch.

You're probably wondering exactly how important this patch is for playing the game and whether or not you'll be able to at least dive into some modes before play? Well, according to the support page the update must be installed even if you do have the disc, if you want access to the multiplayer modes, the Zombies modes, and the Specialist Headquarters. Otherwise, you'll be locked out of all those other modes.

Even with a partial installation you will be able to access the Blackout mode in Black Ops 4, which is Treyarch's attempt at taking on the Battle Royale mode that has become some widespread and popular among the shooting genre in recent years thanks to the skyrocketing success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Epic Games' Fortnite. Blackout will be accessible after 30% of the game has been installed, which the company notes is around 16 -- 20GB.

In total, it's suggested that you have at least 112GB free if you want to install Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, which is just absolutely massive in size. This has been part of the standard operating procedure for some of the newer Call of Duty games since Black Ops 3 from back in 2015. The sizes have been skyrocketing ever since. Most of that overhead free space is for future patches and the DLC roadmap that Activision has laid out for the game.

Now this will pose a problem if you have a spotty internet or internet caps, because 50Gb is no small feat. You would be able to watch about 78 full-length SD movies on Netflix with that amount of space, which means that you could watch two and a half movies every single night within the span of a month from a streaming service for the same size of the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 day-one patch.

Even if you were trying to be frugal with your bandwidth for the month, you're going to have to throw all of that out of the window if you plan on purchasing either a physical or digital copy of Black Ops 4.