Respawn took this decision to make the game playable on underpowered PCs

Mar 11, 2014 13:49 GMT  ·  By

Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment has confirmed just why the new online first-person shooter needs a whopping 50GB of space on the PC platform, blaming it largely on the uncompressed audio files, which were added so that the game can perform smoother on underpowered PCs.

Titanfall is currently rolling out worldwide this week for the PC and Xbox One platforms, bringing millions of gamers a fresh multiplayer first-person shooter experience.

Respawn has already made it clear that quite a lot of space is needed for the game on the PC or Xbox One, as it includes plenty of high-quality textures and other space-hogging items.

On the PC, it has the biggest size, with Respawn recommending at least 50GB of free space.

While talking with Eurogamer, the studio's lead engineer, Richard Baker, has shed some light on this seemingly outrageous requirement, blaming it largely on the uncompressed audio files that are needed by Titanfall so that it runs well even on underpowered PCs.

More specifically, games nowadays use small audio files that are decompressed by the PC's CPU on the fly, resulting in less resources that can be allocated to the actual game. Titanfall, however, bypasses this limitation by using large audio files that aren't compressed in any way, and thereby require just a lot of hard drive space and not CPU power.

"We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio."

"So... it's almost all audio... On a higher PC it wouldn't be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn't be an issue, it's that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn't dedicate those resources to audio."

Titanfall does have quite low minimum PC requirements, running even on dual-core CPUs like Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2.

On the Xbox One, however, it makes use of a special audio decoder that's built into the console's hardware, so that's why it doesn't need that much space on the 500GB hard drive of Microsoft's device.

It's unclear just how much space the game will need on the Xbox 360, on which it will appear later this month, on March 25, in North America, and March 28, in Europe.