Gears of War 4 update pushes game to 100GB+

Microsoft studios have a penchant for absurdly massive game updates: Master Chief Collection had a colossal update, as did Halo 5. It's just what MS Studios do, and The Coalition is no different.

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Gears of War 4's latest update has pushed the game's total install size to 101GB. For comparison's sake, the actual main game is 80GB on PC. So after downloading the update, Gears of War 4 will be taking up 101 GB on your machine. What's even worse is that the Windows Store can sometimes botch the update and make you download 248GB instead. Fun times!

So why is the game so huge now?This latest 10GB patch is the February Update, which adds a special Valentine's Day event, two new maps, and a few tweaks to the Guardian mode. Since the maps are locked behind a season pass paywall, not everyone will have access to them, but these maps are obviously taking up the most data on the update. This means that you might be downloading massive GBs of content that you can't even access--similar to Destiny's on-disc DLC.

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Massive updates that are required for online play is why I stopped playing Halo 5. I just got tired of having to download 18GB updates here, 8GB updates there, 20GB updates, etc etc. Before long Halo 5 was up to 100GB on my Xbox One and taking up 1/5th of the total space for a single game. This really is an absurd trend, and if Microsoft studios are going to roll out such huge updates they should be optional for online play.

But hey, I don't see this changing any time soon. I think Microsoft lives in its own little echo-chamber world. I know 343 Industries sure does.