14 DAY TRIAL // Killzone: Shadow Fall, the upcoming next-gen first-person shooter from Guerrilla Games, required during development a huge amount of data, reaching at some point 290GB but, thanks to various optimizations, the final version only occupies 40GB.
One of the big exclusive games for Sony's PlayStation 4 is Killzone: Shadow Fall, coming from its internal Guerrilla Games team.
The studio has worked hard on the new title, delivering not just great visuals, but also a huge world that sees players engage in a new stage of the Helghast-Vektan war.
According to Guerrilla's Technical Director, Michiel van der Leeuw, the fact that the team didn't need to make any sacrifices, like with the PS3, resulted in some high-quality textures that, unfortunately, needed a lot of space.
"I think we're probably a lot larger than the other cross-generation games, because we have no assets that have been made to a lower spec," he told Eurogamer. "The surface area, I'm just guessing here, must be five to 10 times bigger than Killzone 3 was."
"I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 gigs. 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."
This, of course, wasn't possible, so Guerrilla worked really hard on optimizing the files and making sure that the game's requirements were a bit more feasible.
"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 optimize 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."
As a result, Killzone: Shadow Fall occupies around 40GB, being actually smaller than Killzone 3 for the PS3, which weighed in at around 41GB.