The file size of upcoming PS4 shooter Killzone: Shadow Fall could have been as large as 290GB, until disc optimization brought it down to just 40GB.
Speaking with Eurogamer, Guerrilla’s technical director Michael van der Leeuw spoke about the size and technical aspects of the game :
“The bulk of it is textures, I think we’re probably a lot larger than the other cross-generation games, because we have no assets that have been made to a lower spec. The surface area, I’m just guessing here, must be five to ten times bigger than Killzone 3 was.”
“I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 gigs, and if we would have put all the levels in, which we didn’t, because then the disc image generator broke, it would have been around 290 gigs of data.
“So we had to completely re-architect how we deal with data. And we did a lot of work – this is actually something I’m extremely proud of – to optimise our disc access pattern. Sony made special libraries for us because we were the first ones hitting these sort of problems. I think it’s something that a lot of people will need to be doing in future.”
Having a game with a download size of 290GB is completely unrealistic right now with current hard-drive space, I can easily see games in a few years reaching that size, but I think our download speeds and hard-drive sizes need to greatly improve first. The fact that the surface area of the game is 5-10 times bigger than Killzone 3 is very interesting, I had heard the game was going to be larger but I did not expect it to be that big.
I got the chance to play Killzone: Shadow Fall at the recent Eurogamer Expo and I have to say that I was impressed, the multiplayer seems totally solid and I have great hopes for the game. Hopefully it lives up to expectations and becomes a fantastic launch game for the PS4.
Killzone: Shadow Fall releases exclusively on the PS4 on November 15.
