Titanfall finally hit shelves and download queues today to much positive reception after a long wait, particularly for Xbox One owners who may not have had much else to play. There was a lot of downloading and installing to be done if you got the game--the day one patch isn't too large, and the size on the Xbox One a manageable 20GB--but the PC version, we learned before launch, was a massive 48GB install.
Respawn Entertainment have now let us know why the game is so big. A rumor was spreading last week that the cause of the large file size on PC was upwards of 30GB of uncompressed audio. According to the developers, that's entirely accurate: most of the install is audio.
"Yeah, basically when you download the game or the disc itself, it's a lot smaller than that," Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker replied when asked about the PC version. "We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio."
"So... it's almost all audio...On a higher PC it wouldn't be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn't be an issue, it's that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn't dedicate those resources to audio."
Respawn intentionally left the audio uncompressed to limit the amount of processing power your computer would have to do, but it would only be tough for low-end machines to manage.
It strikes me as an odd decision for a few reasons that alienates some gamers. It seems an obvious solution to have offered an option when you download the game to take the uncompressed or compressed version, with a brief explanation that low-end machines may have trouble running the compressed files. Enthusiasts who have high-end hardware are likely to know the difference and be happy to take the smaller file; forcing the huge install file on everyone is a strange move.
In addition, you have to think the cross-section of people who have a computer that struggles with processing and who also want to download and play a nearly 50GB online shooter isn't very large. They're more than likely a very small portion of the PC market for Titanfall, so it's strange to make the majority of your player base install a huge file to cater to this minority percentage.
Perhaps they'll offer a compressed version in the future, or an option to download and replace the audio files to reduce the size of the file. Titanfall is out today on Xbox One and PC, and will be released on Xbox 360 on March 25.
