This conundrum is perfectly illustrated by the fact that Killzone 3 was actually bigger than Shadow Fall. The next-gen consoles present something of a push-pull challenge for developers: on the one hand, their powerful GPUs and large amounts of RAM can handle extremely high fidelity assets, but on the other, the push towards digital distribution has made consumers more sensitive to file sizes. 'The surface area, I'm just guessing here, must be five to 10 times bigger than Killzone 3 was.'īut he took pains to reassure me that the studio had worked hard to optimise the file size and get players into the game as quickly as possible. '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.' He also pointed to the much larger, more open design of the game's levels compared to previous Killzone games. 'The bulk of it is textures,' Guerrilla's technical director Michiel van der Leeuw told me. It seems that the high quality art assets used by the PS4 are the main culprit. (Infinity Ward has now reduced that to 40GB.) With the new consoles moving towards digital delivery and servers struggling to distribute titles like GTA5, how would our poor internets and hard drives cope with all that data? And why is Killzone so big in the first place? There's been some consternation about the file size of next-gen games since Sony's UK boss told Eurogamer that Killzone was 'cracking on for 50GB' and Nividia suggested that the PC version of Call of Duty: Ghosts required 50GB of hard drive space. Using Sony's PlayGo system, which allows a game to be played while it's still streaming data off the servers, Shadow Fall will be playable after a 7.5GB download.

At an event at Guerrilla's Amsterdam offices this week, the developer confirmed that the final version of PlayStation 4 launch title Killzone Shadow Fall clocks in at 39.7GB (in Europe, anyway: some localised versions of the game, needing fewer audio tracks in different languages, are closer to 37GB).

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