Star Citizen Will Likely Take Up 100GB, With 6GB Patches

Yeah, uh, news. Right, news. Sorry, bit distracted; first Lenord Nemoy, now Terry Prachett… things have not been good in the nerd world as of late, uh…

...so, yeah, Star Citizen. Let’s talk about Star Citizen. Star Citizen is the crowd-funded miracle child of PC Gaming— designed exclusively for PC gaming, in a genre that defined itself by PC gaming—that’s been getting a lot of attention from gamers around the world, and not just for the millions upon millions earned before it has even been released.

Well, with the release date of 2016 fast(?) approaching, a lot of people are wondering just how big this game is going to be, given all that we’ve seen and learned and all the impressive promises made. Largely, these questions are asked due to an underlying fear many fans had that the game would “only” be around 40 Gigs large, which isn’t bad, but also not exactly to the caliber PC gamers would expect.

As it turns out, those fears are unfounded. So unfounded, in fact, you might need a whole new hard drive or memory stick just to play this damn game.

“The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100gb… 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”

100GB for the initial game, with patches that are 6GB each? Mother of god, this game does not mess around. If, for whatever reason, you have a PC that can handle this monster but not the internet to download such a beast, the developer is currently considering sending USB drives with the game files out to people who buy it.

Which is good, but… yeesh. I won’t be playing this game, ever, unless I happen to win a lottery or a rich uncle I don’t know happens to leave me his estate in his will.