Whoever said size doesn’t matter? Star Citizen is already the largest example of crowd funding this side of the UK government’s inevitable Kickstarter campaign of 2022. Now it’s looking likely to be a massive game on PC. We don’t mean as in popularity, although that’s all but certain by now probably, but in terms of hard drive real estate with an estimated client size of 100 GB.
Speaking on the Roberts Space Industries forum, game operations director Jeremy Masker stated that “the size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100 GB.”
This won’t be helped by patches either, as each one is said to contain hundreds of assets that often climb their way up to 200 MB each. As a result, patches are likely to be between 2-6 GBs wide. Add in the whole situation of re-factoring file types leading to a re-download of up to 40% of assets, a Star Citizen patch could technically blast its way up to 20 GB.
The reason this is probably going to cause some people to wince in agony isn’t a direct one. Most PC gamers now have hard drives in excess of a terabyte so it’s not actually space that’s the issue. That issue is that with many internet carriers (especially in Europe) still imposing download limits on their customers, downloading 100 GB of Star Citizen could be out of the reach of many simply because their Internet Service Provider still lives in the dark ages. Add even more to that in the fact that many of these providers still can’t deliver much more than 1 MB/s to customers and a real problem begins to rear its head.
Are you playing Star Citizen right now? Does this vast download size give you hope or fear for the arrival of Star Citizen? Let us know in the comments below.
[Source, PCGamer]
