Metal Gear Solid 5 Digital Download Smaller Than Metal Gear Solid 4

[StewShearerOld]

Metal Gear Solid 5 Digital Download Smaller Than Metal Gear Solid 4

According to the Japanese PlayStation Store, the file size for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will only be 25.1 GB.

If there's been one common thing many of the current generation's games have shared, it's been a propensity for open worlds. Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3, Batman: Arkham Knight; they've all presented players with big play spaces rife with story, side content and extras. An unfortunate side effect of that hugeness however, is that those games also come with hefty install files which, in some cases, have climb as high as 50GB. With <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/conferences/e3-2015/14035-Metal-Gear-Solid-5-The-Phantom-Pain-Preview>Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain focusing on open world mechanics, many likely assumed it would be a similar story. That being the case, it's recently been revealed that the game might not be the data hungry monster many were expecting .

According to a digital listing from the Japanese PlayStation Store, a full download of The Phantom Pain will only require 25.1 GB of hard drive space. That's still substantial, of course, but it also strikes as a bit odd when you compare it to previous games in the series as well as prior statements from The Phantom Pain's creators. The more linear <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/99-Metal-Gear-Solid-4>Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3, for instance, requires 26.6 GB of space; more than the sequel. The Phantom Pain's file size is also surprising when you consider that Hideo Kojima had previously stated that it would be <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/130968-Metal-Gear-Solid-V-Ground-Zeroes-Will-Be-a-Tutorial-For-The-Phantom-Pain>"hundreds of times larger" than its length-challenged predecessor MGS 5: Ground Zeroes. Ground Zeroes clocked <a href=https://store.playstation.com/#!/en-us/games/metal-gear-solid-v-ground-zeroes/cid=UP0101-CUSA00218_00-METALGEARSOLIDGZ>in at 3.6 GB.

There could be a number of good reasons for The Phantom Pain to be smaller on the file size front. The developer's drive to go open world, for instance, could mean that it will have fewer space hogging cutscenes than Metal Gear Solid 4. If the game reuses environments like Ground Zeroes did for side missions, it's also conceivable that its length could have been beefed up without requiring much more data. It could just be that Konami's really good at compressing data. We can't be sure of the reason. That said, we'll let you know when we learn more.

Source: Gamespot


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[ShakerSilver]

MGS4's size was due to all the uncompressed audio files it had. Titanfall had the same problem. It's a primarily multiplayer game with very limited content, but it was 35 GB due to uncompressed audio.

 

[Amaror]

Well, not really anything unusual in that file size. The Witcher 3 was 25 Gb. Skyrim only 7. Is there really any reason Metal Gear 5 should be larger than 25 gb?
And the comparison with Ground Zeroes is just stupid. 100 times the content does not mean 100 times the size. Size in a video games is largely due to textures, all other content like scripts, music, Ai and everything barely needs any space.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

Shakersilver is correct, but I'm also assuming reuseage of assets in the open world, a lot of things that would be cosec/cutscene being experienced as those stupid logs to be listened to outside of the game (Sunderland has got to be expensive...throw in the compatibility that comes with having a PS3 version, and this makes sense. I wonder if we'll see any DLC seeing as there's no Kojima productions anymore, either way "Fuck Konami".

 

[FoolKiller]

Arkham Knight on the other hand with its current patches and DLC is hogging over 65GB of my PS4 right now.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Skyrim on the 360 is 3.9 gig while COD AW is 8 gig. Some developers must optimise through alien technology.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

25Gb is enough for a huge game. Most games that go higher have either lots of audio that might also be uncompressed, uncompressed textures or both. Just look at how big Bethesda games have always been yet vanilla Skyrim is about 10Gb or less. Just Cause 2 was about 5Gb. Witcher 3 in all of its greatness and no-loading times except between regions during fast travel is only 25Gb with the latest patch and DLC's.
The only reason why Shadow of Mordor was so huge was uncompressed textures and GTA V has a shitload of very high quality audio.

 

[Scrythe]

So basically, MSG5 has roughly 90 less minutes of cutscenes than MGS4, so you can watch only eight full-length movies instead of nine.

 

[cikame]

It may be an open world, but it's not rendering living breathing cities with huge numbers of AI routines, large population densities with lots of civilian, building and vehicle variations etc... It may not have any pre-rendered cutscenes either which take up a ton of space.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Games have been doing dumb things with file-sizes for ages. Using noting but uncompressed resources makes loading times longer too. even with an SSD, hard drives, or worse, DVD/BD drives are the slowest component in a computer.
Compression reduces loading times, but demands extra CPU time devoted to decompressing data.
So it's a trade-off.

But how much difference can it really make, anyway?

Well, textures, video and audio files are the biggest data hogs in a game.
Only an insane idiot would use uncompressed video files, so we can rule that out
decent lossless compression can get you files about 1/4 the size. - this is always worth it unless your CPU budget is extremely limited.
lossy compression can get you upwards of 1/10th, to 1/100th the size, depending on the quality tradeoff. In general, it may not be acceptable to lose that much quality, and typically few people go past about 1/15th the original size.

So... What does this say?
Well, the same game using just lossless compression alone would be... let's say 25 gb. If you release a version where none of the resources has any compression, you now have 100 gb instead. (give or take)
Better, in an audio heavy game, use lossless compression on the textures, but lossy audio compression. (mp3, ogg, etc) and you could get something substantially smaller than that again.

So... Mainly, what this tells you is size of data alone cannot predict size of game when the same game can be anything up to about 1/10th the size without losing content. (maybe a tiny loss in quality though) - 10-100 gb is a valid range of sizes without even changing the content at all...

Messed up, isn't it? XD