This is a rant!

For the first time in a long long time I went and bought physical games (I don't game too much and haven't for over 12months). I wanted to play FPSs, I am in the mood. So I buy a couple CoD games (for better or worse). Holy fk. The worst.
Now... I know there's gonna be a download and an update... But this... Black Ops 3 or whatever 36gb update after the install?! For features I'm not going to use but have to have?! Fuck off.
So I skip that with fingers crossed.
I pop in MW3.
5hrs worth of install & update time.
Okay, Rest Mode. Got it.
Finally sit down to try and play and I have to make an Activision ACC?!! Fine, so do that.
Now I'm fucking confused because ALL of the COD games are on screen, why? (I feel old)
AND FINALLY there's MW3 and I have to FUCKING DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING GAME?!?!
60 ODD GBs?! ANOTHER 6HRS DOWNLOAD.

FUCK.
THESE.
GAMES.

TLDR;
I feel old and PS CoD games are complicated to install for literally just the campaign.
Are all games like this now?
Is this modern console gaming?
I hate it.

Edit: I finally finished downloading MW3 and it didn't even come with the campaign. I have to DL that separately, apparently. Another 30GB and 3.5hrs. Rest Mode again.
Taking the absolute piss.

That's modern CoD for ya :)

It's shit show. Indie FPSs are where it's at

You're absolutely right, it's bizarre how Activision handled the updates to these games. They went full Games As a Service and now it's almost impossible to play CoD MW, and the game sits at over 200GB

Any recommendations?

Seconded

Bizarre is 100% right. Pop disk in (d/l sure) and play. How hard? Too hard. Incredible GB size. Let's spend some more money on external storage.
Something I never had to do with PS3. Again, I feel old.

6 hours for 60GB? WTF, which year do you live in?

Battle bits was pixel COD/MW. Not sure if its atil going strong.

For an absolutely hilarious yet challenging experience (you need the right people honestly), Hold Fast. Nothing says fun like a second rate crewed by Americans doing bad British accents and Brits doing bad American accents trying to sink a French second rate crewed by Germans.

I don't really play shooters on consoles, but New Blood publishes a lot of good ones (Dusk, Ultrakill, Amid Evil, Don't Stop Girlypop)

It's an old PS4 and I live in Australia... Them's the breaks.

Great, will check, thanks

OK, sounds interesting and looks attractive

I know nothing about game design, but here "poor optimization" often regarding such large games. Is this an instance if that? What exactly is optimizing?

There are lots of good FPS games out there, free ones too, that aren't cancer. I personally love The Finals, but you could literally never pay a dime for another shooter and still not have enough free time to play.

Cool! I'll check it out. I guess the point of this particular moment in time was to buy physical. But I'm definitely not against DL games. Gotta get me a HDD.

The F2P BR CoD is super fucking huge and I wonder if it contains files for other CoD games because they all use a single launcher app now. Shit shows up in my Steam library as whatever the newest paid CoD is instead of as just Warfare like it did back when it launched.

All games are not this. This is really more of a CoD/Bliz-Activision problem.

I'm not sure exactly what optimization is... But yeah, I'm willing to bet CoD is a victim of this? Release a 3/4 baked game and then patch it on the fly. That may certainly acc for the huge updates needed from the very start.

In short, yes, I believe it does contain those files; based on my experience. However, after I downloaded the "application" for the game I then had to DL the campaign separately... I couldn't fucking believe it.

Anyway, thank fuck this is a Bliz-Acti problem. Otherwise, modern gaming would be a thing of the past for me.

It's always worth checking https://www.doesitplay.org/ if you have concerns like this. It also helps you ensure that your copy remains playable when they shut off the servers some day.

For example Modern Warfare 3 looks like one of the worst offenders with not being playable from disc.

This is excellent. What a great resource. Sadly, it shouldn't have to exist but given the current state I'm glad it does. I can confirm the info on MW3 is accurate.

My personal theory is that the CoD games do their best to swallow as much storage as possible to prevent you from having the space to install anything else - especially something else that comes from a rival studio.

When I moved from PS4 to a PS5 I thought things would improve with the increased data bandwidth and SSD. They did not.

Welp! Jokes on them. Although, I can see the possibility of this being advantageous if one were too lazy to delete/load anything else and then just play CoD online forever.