It has been revealed that Guerrilla Games’ Killzone: Shadow Fall on the PS4 will be weight in at 39.7 GB, if downloading the game from the PlayStation Network, but will be playable after an initial download of just 7.5 GB. Sony’s PlayGo system will allow the game to be played after less than 20% of the game has been downloaded.
The European version of the game will be almost 40 GB in size, but other regions are likely to be lower in size. Guerrilla Games has managed to shrink the size of the game down considerably, since the game was said to be approaching the 50 GB mark.
The game’s size is large mainly due to the textures used by the PS4. “The bulk of it is textures,” Michiel van der Leeuw told Eurogamer, continuing “”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 game has been compressed considerably too, with Killzone 3 on the PS3 slightly larger at 41.5 GB on Blu-ray, due to duplicate textures and large video files in a multitude of languages. If the same approach was used with the PS4 version, the file size would be massive.
“I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 gigs,” said van der Leeuw, revealing that “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.”
The initial 7.5 GB download will include the first level of the game, while the second level downloads in the background.