Watch Dogs: Legion Gets Massive Update On Xbox Series X

3.3

Released in October of 2020, Watch Dogs: Legion is the third title in the open-world action-adventure series. Developed by Ubisoft and featuring hacking prominently in its gameplay, Watch Dogs: Legion was released to decent but unremarkable reviews, with the game earning a 72% rating on Metacritic for its PC version. The game was praised for its impressive depiction of future London and ambitious “you can play as anyone” approach, but criticized for its repetition and poor story due to the game’s lack of a central protagonist.

As with most of its titles as of late, Ubisoft has continued to release update after update for Watch Dogs: Legion. These various changes have included multiplayer support, a 60fps performance mode on next-gen consoles, and a recently-added co-op zombie mode titled Legion of the Dead. The most recent 5.6 patch, which dropped on September 14, was an absolutely massive update to the title – for one platform, in particular.

Unfortunately, this ‘massive update’ isn’t massive in terms of content, but rather file size. Despite only featuring a small handful of bug fixes, the update is clocking in at a bizarrely large 40.2GBs on the Xbox Series S/X consoles. This is nearly the file size of the entire original release of Watch Dogs: Legion.

To make matters worse, the PlayStation 5 version of Legion's update is downright diminutive in comparison at 3.2GBs, much to the chagrin of Xbox Series S/X owners. There are a few possible theories for this, such as file storage being handled differently on the Xbox console even though both the Series S/X and PS5 use solid-state drives. Perhaps there is a greater code rework being done in the Xbox variant despite the patch notes not showing anything different.

As file sizes in many games continue to grow with technological advancements, many gamers are finding themselves exasperated with their constant storage issues. Total console storage hasn’t increased a significant amount since the last generation and more and more players are moving to digital libraries, too. It isn’t even just storage woes either, with titles getting greater post-launch support and many games like Battlefield 2042 moving to a live-service model, players with slower internet are finding it much harder to keep up to the steady stream of patches.

Watch Dogs: Legion is hardly the worst offender, though. Call of Duty: Warzone receives constant large updates and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s file size continues to balloon out of control, now totaling over 200GBs and taking up about one-third of the PlayStation 5’s storage space. Still, Legion’s big update size on Xbox Series S/X is extra confounding, being that the game isn’t even that large, to begin with.

Watch Dogs: Legion is available on PC, Stadia, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X.