Star Citizen kind of feels like it’s set out to achieve one thing: one-upping the consoles on almost everything. Mr. Star Citizen himself, Chris Roberts, has been emphatic about the fact that the game is being made for PC and will never be “dumbed down” for “lesser platforms” like consoles. Move over, Crysis, because Star Citizen is basically the new poster-child for PC gaming and the associated superiority complex.
There’s now a new area in which Star Citizen has taken the lead: its download size and subsequent install. Those of you who are already mucking about in the various modules that have been made available for pledgers, will know that download sizes are already big. If you want to download the simple Hangar Module and Arena Commander, you’re sitting with a download of well over 20GB already. This has left a number of people wondering how big the final client will be.
About 100GB, according to Cloud Imperium’s Jeremy Masker.
This is the current estimated size for the final version of the Star Citizen client. That’ll be for the persistent Star Citizen universe, the FPS portions, and Squadron 42. Well, at least we hope it’ll include everything.
Masker was responding to a forum post by a user who was trying to predict the final client download size. That user speculated that the final client would utilise better compression software and better optimization, which they estimated would result in a final client download of 30-40GBs. “I would not count on this,” responded Masker.
“The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB.”
Yowzers, and here we were gawking at the install size of The Witcher 3 being pegged at 50GB for consoles. How cute! Now the PC is sitting with a 100GB client size. So there you go, PC people, you see what your superiority complex has brought upon you?
But wait, it gets better! That 100GB is for the initial client, so what about patches? The same forum member suggested that again, through optimization, patches for the games would be a couple of hundred megabytes. Again, however, Masker had to burst that hopeful little bubble:
“Yes we are optimizing game patching for speed and to only deliver diffs, but this is unlikely to reduce actual patch size. Again, each patch has 100s of assets, each of these assets are at times 200mb, this leads to 2-6gb patches, and if we end up doing a file type re-factor and have to re-download 30-40% of the assets on the hard-drive, then the patch will be 14-20gb.”
Well gosh, looks like you’ll need to put this game on its own HDD or SSD, and possibly splurge on some extra cap limit for your ADSL.
Source: PC Gamer