Games nowadays have gotten a lot bigger. Red Dead Redemption 2 is 119GB and Call of Duty Modern Warfare is a whopping 200+GB. For a long time, gamers have been asking developers to reduce their game sizes, however, only a few have actually listened. Digital Extremes is one of them. Their free-to-play multiplayer role-playing game Warframe is getting a size reduction.
As of right now, Warframe takes up around 40GB of HDD space. It’s not the biggest game in size, however, Digital Extremes still wants to reduce the overall footprint. In a recent ‘The Great Ensmallening’ blog post, Digital Extremes explained how they planned to compress the game textures. They also claimed that the upcoming update will reduce the game’s size by 6.6GB. If everything goes according to plan, then in the future the game size can even be reduced by 15GB.
Developers used the analogy of how compression works in PNG and JPG. The new Oodle Texture technology that the game is utilizing can reduce file sizes by half with only a little visual difference.
“One of the things we’re doing to reduce our footprint involves changing how our texture data is compressed. Although it isn’t a perfect analogy it’s similar to the trade-off between image-quality and file-size you get with different image formats: PNG is lossless but can mean very large files, JPEG files can be very small but may contain visible artifacts of the compression,” the official blog post said. “The technology we’re using is called Oodle Texture and we’re extremely pleased with the savings we’re getting: our files are roughly half the size on disk and the visual differences are negligible.”
To make it easier for the players, the upcoming update will only be around 7GB in size. Other changes regarding the textures will be made throughout the year. So for the recent future, Warframe's size is only going to get smaller. Maybe Modern Warfare can take some notes from this.
So what do you think? Have you been playing Warframe recently? Do you care about the smaller game size? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
