Metal Gear Solid 5’s Download Size Is Surprisingly Small

We’re sure a lot of folks are excited for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain to drop. What they’re probably not excited for is the inevitably large download size it’ll probably come with, because there’s only so much you can squeeze into your 1TB PlayStation 4.

It turns out, it’s actually not that huge. Alright, 25GB is still pretty big, but this is Metal Gear Solid 5 we’re talking about. It’s estimated to be around 200 times bigger than the puny area we got in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, and that came in at about 2.9GB. Shouldn’t the file be a little… idunno, bigger?

If we go by the “200 times bigger than MGS5:GZ” computation, it should come in at about 500GB. That’s ridiculous, so let’s go with something that should be closer in size: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots slides in at over 30GB. MGS5 is still relatively underweight, and it’s just not computing.

Here we have a game that’s estimated to have up to 100 hours worth of story campaign to go through. It’s supposedly an open world, too. It’s starting to look like a very small world, and we’ve got a couple of theories as to why this is so.

A reasonable explanation would be that TPP is being released in episodes, perhaps to make it easier on the players. Download the first portion and play while the next episode is downloading. Get it into the hands of players faster, that kind of thing.

A less pleasant possibility is that a number of things have been cut from the game. Maybe Metal Gear Online got axed? Could they be removing stuff over the reported Kojima-Konami power struggle?

We’ve got our fingers crossed that maybe the FOX Engine just handles compression really, really well. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is scheduled for a September 1 launch for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. The PC port will launch on September 15.