Cloud Imperium devs have been answering questions in an open thread on the Star Citizen forums all week, but last night, they dropped a whopper of an answer that’s making headlines across the blogoverse. In response to a player’s assertion that the client could be compressed to be as small as 30 to 40gb, CIG’s Jeremy Masker cautioned that the client size might be far bigger — potentially 100gb:
As I have already said, I would not count on this. 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.
World of Warcraft, for comparison’s sake, sits around 30gb with 10 years’ worth of expansions racked up. Guild Wars 2 is just shy of 22.
You still have three days to check out Star Citizen for free thanks to its PAX promo.
[Source: Original post, new thread]
