Killzone: Shadow Fall Could Have Been a 290GB Game

The PS4 launch shooter is now set to be only 40GB.

Last month Sony indicated Killzone: Shadow Fall was on track to weigh in at 50GB upon release, a figure that has now fallen to about 40GB. Remarkably, the game could have actually been many times larger.
Speaking with Eurogamer, developer Guerrilla indicated the final version of Shadow Fall is 39.7GB in Europe. That exact number may differ slightly depending upon the specific localization, some of which require fewer audio tracks and therefore may be closer to 37GB than 40.

This is good news for anyone planning on purchasing a digital version of the game; while Shadow Fall will only require 7.5GB of it to download before being playable thanks to the system's PlayGo functionality, the remainder of the game does still need to be downloaded eventually, and 10GB's worth of data less can make the total download time substantially lower for those with slower connections. Even if this downsizing hadn't been accomplished, the game's total size is still a great smaller than it could have been.
Killzone 3 was itself a massive game, thanks in part to certain data being duplicated on the disc in order to speed up load times. Doing the same thing for Killzone's debut on PS4 could have been extremely problematic. "I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 gigs," explained Guerrilla technical director Michiel van der Leeuw. "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."
Shadow Fall went gold earlier this week and is set to be released alongside PlayStation 4 on November 15 in the U.S. and November 29 in Europe and Australia.

Killzone: Shadow Fall

Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developed by: Guerrilla Games

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Release Date:

United States: November 15, 2013

Australia: November 29, 2013

UK: November 29, 2013

Japan: TBA

RP-M+ for Rating Pending, Targeting a Rating of Mature or Above

Also Available On:

Also known as: Killzone Shadow Fall