PlayStation 4 gamers will find it interesting when they go to plunk down at their desk or chair, and turn on their system to notice that Call of Duty: Ghosts has received a truly massive patch, wheighing in at 1.7GB.
Wow, Infinity Ward must've fixed a whole heap of problems! Weapon balancing, glitches, they must all be a thing of the past, right?
Guess again. In the time it takes you to go and make a sandwich while this patch installs, you'll be surprised to learn that all this thing does is to "fix a crash that could occur at the start screen, if you started downloading Onslaught before launching a game."
That's it? A possible problematic start bug for an optional piece of DLC? Yep, that'd be it. This begs the question, just why a lonley little fix takes up such a large amount of space?
Activision Support did its best to explain the patch's laviathan size over at Reddit, but the official word was surprisingly short on a legitimate explanation: "Unfortunately we don't have information on why the patches are the sizes that they are. Most of the details are included in the patch notes, I know the notes released today were a bit small, we're sorry to say we wouldn't have the full details as to why a patch focused on stability was so large."
"File size varies by platform, PS4 and Xbox One will typically be larger than its predecessors since their hardware differs from the previous generation platforms. Newer consoles are able to handle more, be it improved graphics, or even support for Ground war, so when patches/games are released for these newer platforms more data is required."
"All patches, and patch notes are released by the studio, Infinity Ward. We apologize you've had to download so many files lately, multiplayer on Ghosts is one of the most popular features in the game, the development studio releases updates to help improve its performance."
So it's a buck pass then, eh? Well, the patch has been out for several hours now, but someone from the developer similarly has yet to explain why a crash fix takes up 1.7 GB. Last word from the developer's official Twitter is a picture of a gentleman with an admirable handlebar mustache. So there's that...