Call of Duty: Modern Warfare fix causes Xbox owners more headaches

A download to enable Season 4 of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was twice the size it should have been for some players

The makers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare say they have "resolved" a problem that caused updates to the video game to be more than twice the size they should have been.

But several players who have tried to take advantage of the fix have reported being worse off as a consequence.

The initial issue led some Xboxes to start downloading an 85 gigabyte file that should have been about 40GB.

And some who cancelled this to try again have lost their main game file.

As a consequence they have had to download the entire title from scratch, entailing a download of more than 100GB.

In theory it should take about four hours to download a file of that size on an average UK home broadband connection.

In practice, however, it takes much longer, because the data cannot be downloaded at the maximum speed if there are too many people trying to do so at once.

Big update

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Season 4 update introduces new weapons, narrative video scenes, maps and bug fixes to Activision's first-person shooter.

Once downloaded, it takes up only 4GB more storage than the previous version on the hard drive.

Even so, some players have expressed concern at the amount of disc space they are having to give up - as the game has had one of the largest file sizes among mainstream games since its release last year.

On Sony's PlayStation 4, the installed game can now take up close to 200GB in total - about half disc space available on the basic version.

Owners can, however, delete some of the modes they do not play to free up storage for other games and media.

The update was originally scheduled to have been made available on 3 June but developer Infinity Ward said it had been held back until now to allow people to focus on voices calling for "equality, justice and change" as part of the US protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.

Activision said the latest version of Modern Warfare had been its bestselling Call of Duty game to date, during a recent analysts briefing.

The company makes money from each season update as players can pay a fee to unlock new content rather than having to spend hours earning it via a series of in-game achievements.