I remember the time when I installed Fallout Tactics in 2001 and almost fell off my seat when I saw that the install size would be slightly over 1 Gigabyte. How times have changed in little over a decade, when Star Citizen, the upcoming space sim Goliath by Cloud Imperium Games, is set to be over 100 GB in size.
Yes, you read that right. One hundred gigabytes, and that’s just to download the client.
The news was revealed by director of game operations Jeremy Masker, who, in the game’s official forum, disputed claims that the final game would be optimized down to a 30-40 GB size. He wrote:
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.
Also, 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.
This massive install size should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following Star Citizen‘s legendary climb to success. The game will include a singleplayer and arena-style multiplayer mode, along with a massive persistent universe and first-person shooter elements that allow players to seamlessly hop in and out of their ships to do battle on foot.
It is also now the single most successfully crowdfunded thing, nevermind videogame, in history, having achieved close to $75 million in funding as of today.
The game is expected to be released sometime in 2016, so prospective players have plenty of time to start upgrading their hard drives.