Star Citizen - Largest Game?

 

Is Star Citizen the largest game ever? Both in concept and file size? And lets not forget crowd funding. Since 2012 the developers of Star Citizen have been relying on crowd funding, to fund the development of the game and they have just crossed over the $75 million milestone; which is a record for a crowd funded video game. In terms of scope, the game is huge as it is set in space and you can also land on planets manually (fly yourself) all the way down to the detail-enriched surface of the planet, into a city.

 

In terms of file size, the game boasts about 100GB in file size. This file size is also a record in history; blowing games like Titanfall (50GB file size) out of the water.

 

On their forums, the developers responded to poster, who claimed:

 

"The game files will be significantly more compressed and optimised than they are now. The size of the final game would probably be more like 30-40GB. Game patching will also be more optimised, so minor patches will be hundreds of M, and content patches would be a few GB."

 

- Forum poster, Star Citizen Forums

 

To which a developer responded with:

 

"As I have already said, I would not count on this. The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40gb. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is more likely to be 100gb. Also, yes we are optimizing game patching for and to only deliver diffs, but this is unlikely to reduce actual patch size. Again, each patch has 100s of assets, each of these 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."

 

- JMasker.CIG, Developer of Star Citizen

 

Star Citizen is huge. If you were to download Star Citizen, with a file size of 100GB, it would take you 110 hours to completely download the game. 4 and a half days. The culprit for this huge file size is likely to be textures. You need great texture to bring a game to life, and great textures mean large texture file sizes, because great textures mean high resolution images (like 8k textures maybe?) and as such will be huge. They may even use multiple texture files for just one model to really keep the detail good and gold. No expense will be spared for this huge game that is coming over the horizon.

 

According to WCCF Tech, the game will utilize 8K Ultra-HD Resolution textures; thanks to being free from consoles. In other words, they do not need to worry about consoles. There is also likely to be a lot of un-compressed audio in the game.

 

Much like Quake and Crysis in their early days; the game is being designed (graphically) for hardware that does not yet exist and as such it is to be expected that not a lot or no PC will be able to run this game at full graphics once it releases.