TL;DR, although one would have expected lower quality textures and other assets,they're actually achieving this by deduplicating data which was originally duplicated to reduce loading times. They've found a way to deduplicate without affecting loading times. (Lossless compression might be involved too -- post is vague.) They'll make this the new default version of the game after ironing out the bugs.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Lowkey makes me question whether the theories of publishers inflating file size to monopolize gamers hard drives and, thus, their time, could carry more weight than I previously thought.
I know Nanite can enable some massive assets to ship, so maybe that’s part of the current file size situation. Also uncompressed audio can be really big!
But this is like 1/6 the file size, without reducing quality or compressing data… that’s insane!
Doubtful. There are games I was dissuaded to get just because of their massive size.
Minorly related, audio doesn't compreess very well, because compression relies on eliminating duplicate data and audio doesn't have a lot of that! Fun fact in case you didn't lnow
By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from 154GB to 23GB, for a total saving of 131GB (~85%).
Jesus Christ that's a lot of duplicated data.
Stitching all 4k textures together for each level go brrrr
154 GB to 23 GB
And that's just by removing unused assets, not doing anything clever /s
Jokes aside, a pet peeve of mine is how most of my colleagues seem to think memory is free, and that if something is too computationally intensive, too bad, nothing we can do but wait for the hardware to "catch up". So it's good to see some effort to curb the insane (and useless) memory requirements of modern games from time to time.
Memory requirements? Or hard-drive? Would this change impact on both?
Sorry I was ranting about a couple loosely related things (which have more to do with a general attitude of the industry) and thus was not clear.
What I meant to say was that I speak a lot with programmers who treat resources (be it computational, RAM, or disk space) as free and infinite.
This is indeed only about disk space (as far as I can tell). Although, their post does explain that the reason for the bloated build was to speed up loading times with duplication of data (if fact they quadrupled it even) because they were allegedly afraid of the loading times on older HDDs.
The install size isn't what bugs me.
It's the CPU bound performance making it run like shit unless you set it to potato graphics. Make it utilize the GPU more.
I'm glad to see pcmasterrace be 13 GBs smaller than PS5 [35(?)GBs on PS5].
Anyone know the Xbox install size?
holy shit, this is gonna stay installed on my steam deck now
Will it allow me to run updates that don't take 45-60 minutes to apply even though I have the game installed on an NVME drive?
Literally uninstalled the game because I was tired of waiting forever for updates to apply every few days.
I think you might have some sort of problem, mine never takes very long at all to update. I have a five year old PC, roughly.