Guerrilla Games Explains Why Killzone: Shadow Fall Was Almost 290GB

Killzone: Shadow Fall is a big game. You might not think that a mostly linear FPS would push the limits of a hard drive, but Eurogamer has confirmed with Guerrilla Games that the PS4 exclusive will be 39.7GB. That sounds like pretty big number, but what about the game is taking up so much space?

"The bulk of it is textures," Guerrilla's technical director Michiel van der Leeuw said. "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. The surface area, I'm just guessing here, must be five to 10 times bigger than Killzone 3 was."

And the fun doesn’t stop there. It might sound crazy, but the game was pushing 290GB at one point in development.

"I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 gigs," van der Leeuw said. "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.

"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."

Shadow Fall is pretty, but not 290GB worth of pretty. Expect this highly pre-ordered game at the PS4’s Nov. 15 launch.