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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 release sees UK's biggest-ever gaming traffic for internet service providers

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 released today, and it is pulling in some serious numbers for many internet service providers.

According to EE, BT and Virgin Media O2, the game's launch and pre-load period has seen record traffic across each of the networks.
In a new press release, Virgin Media O2 stated on Wednesday 8th November, when the game was available to pre-load, its broadband network "hit 25.1Tbps at peak (8-10pm)".

The company noted Modern Warfare 3's spike was "a 22 percent increase on the peak traffic seen during this last week's return of Fortnite's original map" (as a quick reminder, Virgin Media is specifically talking about UK traffic here).
It's also worth noting that while there was more traffic for Modern Warfare 3, the file sizes for the Call of Duty sequel are a lot higher, contributing to the high data counts. That may explain the high internet usage in comparison to Fortnite's recent record numbers of concurrent players.
Meanwhile, in a separate press release, EE said its own Modern Warfare 3-related network peak "highlighted one of the highest traffic to customer ratios". This, it said, indicated that a large number of gamers were using the network.

It went on to state this spike (which like Virgin was also recorded since Wednesday) was the "biggest single game contribution to a broadband peak" for both EE and BT broadband.

It marked the second highest overall peak for the companies. The only other date to see higher traffic for EE and BT was earlier this year, on 15th February. No, this wasn't because of some strange Valentine's Day hangover. Rather, it was predominantly thanks to football. This date apparently saw the combined efforts of a Premier League "clash" between Arsenal and Man City, which was broadcast online, as well as multiple Champions League fixtures and the Call of Duty: Warzone Season 2 update boosting traffic.
 
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Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
>Start working on DLC
>Work on it for 18 months when AAA games take 5-7 years to make
>Running out of time, repackage it as a a sequel
>Sell it for the price of a AAA game
>Make more profits than most AAA games
>Laugh all the way to the bank as gamers ain't shit

Michael Jordan Lol GIF
 

Elysium44

Banned
How did these games get so bloated? The original MW3 was 16GB. The graphics may be more detailed now but not proportionately to the size increase. CoD in its heyday never used to be about cutting edge graphics anyway, the fast-paced gameplay itself was the main attraction.
 

BigLee74

Member
How did these games get so bloated? The original MW3 was 16GB. The graphics may be more detailed now but not proportionately to the size increase. CoD in its heyday never used to be about cutting edge graphics anyway, the fast-paced gameplay itself was the main attraction.
So you’re saying you would still be happy with 2009 level graphics because it’s all about the gameplay? Install MW3 today, and you’ll be surprised at how rubbish it looks by modern standards.

The textures, the amount and complexity of unique assets required for MP/campaign/zombies/Warzone - yeah it costs drive space unfortunately. It’s not rocket science.

To be fair though, you should be allowed to select what you want to install before it does a huge download - they could definitely improve that mechanism.
 
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Hip Hop

Member
>Start working on DLC
>Work on it for 18 months when AAA games take 5-7 years to make
>Running out of time, repackage it as a a sequel
>Sell it for the price of a AAA game
>Make more profits than most AAA games
>Laugh all the way to the bank as gamers ain't shit

Michael Jordan Lol GIF

And it costs $69.99

200.gif
 

AngelMuffin

Member
How did these games get so bloated? The original MW3 was 16GB. The graphics may be more detailed now but not proportionately to the size increase. CoD in its heyday never used to be about cutting edge graphics anyway, the fast-paced gameplay itself was the main attraction.
I’m assuming 4K textures & additional game modes like Warzone, but yeah, it’s ridiculous.
 
How did these games get so bloated? The original MW3 was 16GB. The graphics may be more detailed now but not proportionately to the size increase.
...uhh it's entirely proportional, RE5 in 2009 was 7GB, REm4ke is 70GB, you think textures are free?
In the 360 era all resolutions were low, because that's what the hardware allowed, remember that the 360 only had 512MB of ram, which is OS + engine memory + framebuffer.
This meant that a lot of textures were tiny, with "important objects" being at a max of 512x512 and everything else much lower.
Nowadays even a "4K textures pack" won't exclusively contain 4kx4k textures, because that's just absolutely massive and not every object needs such a huge texture, it's more used as a shorthand for "if you are using and UHD resolution, or have equivalent vram available, you can get a boost in detail with these higher res textures", but this could mean changing a 256x256 texture to 512x, or a 1kx to 2kx, however this quadruples the file size.

Now for the actual increase it's not just because textures now use higher base resolutions, it's also because there's more of them, back in the 360 days you could just only have a diffuse (colour) texture and that was all you needed, maybe a lightmap as well, but normal/height/spec maps weren't needed everywhere.
Now with physical based rendering your materials will have a lot of different channels that make use of different texture files, and on top of that, the objects themselves use more materials (in a complex object you'll need to break up the texture files into several ones to keep everything at the same level of detail).
So it's like an exponential increase in texture file size from nearly 20 years ago, and it's to be expected.
Then there's audio which acts similarly to textures when it comes to resolution, and it makes complete sense that games are 10x bigger now.

So when you have a game that has a lot of additional content (remember that all cosmetics from MWII carry over to MWIII), this file size is completely normal, there really isn't much you can do to reduce it.
 

Elysium44

Banned
...uhh it's entirely proportional, RE5 in 2009 was 7GB, REm4ke is 70GB, you think textures are free?
In the 360 era all resolutions were low, because that's what the hardware allowed, remember that the 360 only had 512MB of ram, which is OS + engine memory + framebuffer.
This meant that a lot of textures were tiny, with "important objects" being at a max of 512x512 and everything else much lower.
Nowadays even a "4K textures pack" won't exclusively contain 4kx4k textures, because that's just absolutely massive and not every object needs such a huge texture, it's more used as a shorthand for "if you are using and UHD resolution, or have equivalent vram available, you can get a boost in detail with these higher res textures", but this could mean changing a 256x256 texture to 512x, or a 1kx to 2kx, however this quadruples the file size.

Now for the actual increase it's not just because textures now use higher base resolutions, it's also because there's more of them, back in the 360 days you could just only have a diffuse (colour) texture and that was all you needed, maybe a lightmap as well, but normal/height/spec maps weren't needed everywhere.
Now with physical based rendering your materials will have a lot of different channels that make use of different texture files, and on top of that, the objects themselves use more materials (in a complex object you'll need to break up the texture files into several ones to keep everything at the same level of detail).
So it's like an exponential increase in texture file size from nearly 20 years ago, and it's to be expected.
Then there's audio which acts similarly to textures when it comes to resolution, and it makes complete sense that games are 10x bigger now.

So when you have a game that has a lot of additional content (remember that all cosmetics from MWII carry over to MWIII), this file size is completely normal, there really isn't much you can do to reduce it.

MW3 is 12 years old, not 20. I was referring to the PC version requirements; the 360 version uses 7.5GB.

Take your patronising 'uhh' and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. The game now has 20 times the size requirement on console, it doesn't look 20 times better, that's the point. No need for your wall of text telling me what I already know.
 
MW3 is 12 years old, not 20. I was referring to the PC version requirements; the 360 version uses 7.5GB.
Oh, so you're just a moron, I didn't say MW3 was 20 years old, I said it's an exponential increase in texture file size from nearly 20 years ago, in relation to the hardware it's running on, the 360 didn't suddenly get more ram when MW3 released, the same hardware constraints apply, but I shouldn't have to explain that to anyone with a modicum of intelligence..

Take your patronising 'uhh' and stick it where the sun doesn't shine
Clearly you need some patronising because your brain doesn't work if you write stupid shit like:
The game now has 20 times the size requirement on console, it doesn't look 20 times better
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
>Start working on DLC
>Work on it for 18 months when AAA games take 5-7 years to make
>Running out of time, repackage it as a a sequel
>Sell it for the price of a AAA game
>Make more profits than most AAA games
>Laugh all the way to the bank as gamers ain't shit

Michael Jordan Lol GIF

Phil-Spencer-happy.jpg
 
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TGO

Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
So you’re saying you would still be happy with 2009 level graphics because it’s all about the gameplay? Install MW3 today, and you’ll be surprised at how rubbish it looks by modern standards.

The textures, the amount and complexity of unique assets required for MP/campaign/zombies/Warzone - yeah it costs drive space unfortunately. It’s not rocket science.

To be fair though, you should be allowed to select what you want to install before it does a huge download - they could definitely improve that mechanism.
To be fair the game is 200gb for both MW2 & 3
and it was 190gb before which pretty much confirms it's all bloat
 
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