Console folks got Advanced Warfare yesterday. PC got it today, November 4th, and I've been staring at a Steam progress bar for the better part of the afternoon because apparently this game wants something like 50 gigs of my SSD. Fifty. I checked twice because I assumed I'd misread it. I didn't.
I'll back up. Sledgehammer Games is the developer this time around, not Infinity Ward and not Treyarch, which is actually a bigger deal than it sounds. Sledgehammer co-developed Modern Warfare 3 back in 2011, but this is the first one they've led solo. And the headline gimmick this year is the exoskeleton suit, which lets you double-jump, dash sideways, and generally move like the laws of physics took the day off. It's a real departure from the boots-on-the-ground stuff the series has done forever, and I was curious enough about it that I preordered the Xbox One version too, mostly to watch friends play last night while my own copy churned through downloads.
The thing everybody's actually talking about though is Kevin Spacey. He plays a character called Jonathan Irons, and they didn't just hire him for voice work, they did full motion capture, so it's genuinely his face and his performance driving every cutscene. This is the same year House of Cards Season 2 aired, so Spacey is about as hot a name as you can get right now, and Activision clearly knew what they had. Whether an A-list actor in a shooter actually changes how the game plays is a separate question (it doesn't, not really), but it does make the cutscenes watchable in a way CoD cutscenes usually aren't, and I say that as someone who's mashed the skip button through every single one since Modern Warfare.
Now, my actual complaint, because I do have one and it's not small. On top of Steam, you also have to install a separate "Call of Duty" launcher app that Activision bolts on for matchmaking and updates. So it's not enough that Steam is already sitting there in the background — now I've got a second piece of software babysitting the first one. I get why they do it (their own telemetry, their own patch cadence, not beholden to Valve's update pipe) but it's an extra process eating RAM for a game I'm going to play for maybe six weeks before I move on to something else. And that install size (50GB on a 256GB SSD) is not nothing, I had to go delete a couple of old Steam installs I wasn't touching anymore just to make room, which is exactly the kind of afternoon-eating chore I didn't sign up for on a Tuesday.
Price-wise it's the usual $59.99 for the base game, but there's also a Digital Pro Edition running $99.99 that bundles the season pass in, and the season pass itself is priced at $49.99 on its own. That's basically half the cost of the game again just to get four DLC map packs down the line, and I know I'm not the first person to grumble about season pass creep in this franchise, but it keeps creeping regardless of the grumbling, so here we are.
I've played every mainline Call of Duty since the original one came out in 2003, back when it was still a WWII shooter and nobody was talking about "movement systems" or "exo suits." There's a version of me that misses when these games were simpler, and a version of me that's still going to sink twenty hours into the campaign this week anyway, contradictions and all. That's kind of the deal with this franchise at this point — I complain about it every November and then I buy it every November.
Install's at 78% as I'm typing this. I'm going to go make coffee and let it finish. If the campaign's any good I'll probably write more about it once I've actually gotten past the tutorial mission, which, last I checked, was still downloading its own separate chunk of assets. Fifty gigs. I keep coming back to that number.