Games Thirst – Amazing Life
Imagine a 6 Blu-ray disc set for a game.
Yep, you read that right. Guerrilla Games’ Killzone: Shadow Fall, the most impressive PS4 launch title, will be 39.7GB in size as Eurogamer revealed. But before that, it was around — hold tightly — 290GB. What was the cause? Guerrilla’s technical director Michiel van der Leeuw explained in a very interesting Eurogamer interview.
“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 10 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.”
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.”
Lastly, Van der Leeuw said that when you pop the disc in, you are greeted by the title menu. A lot of sweat went into dealing with companies to avoid usual splash screens like Dolby’s making you cringe until you reached the game’s menu.
Read the whole interview over at Eurogamer, which we thank for the news!
