Largest pc game download - authoritative
The biggest game installs: can anything top Final Fantasy 15's 148GB on PC?
Install sizes have been ballooning with the onset of 4K gaming, and the recently released PC version of Final Fantasy 15 may well top the lot. The 85GB base game combines with the 63GB optional high-resolution pack to make the install a whopping 148GB. Imagine downloading that on an old modem.
But is it the biggest? I've had a nose around on Steam and consulted the Digital Foundry team, which has analysed Final Fantasy 15 on PC, and tried to find out.
On Steam, many games come close but none top Final Fantasy 15. The Call of Duty games are enormous; Black Ops 3 is a chunky 113GB and Infinite Warfare is 101GB (how big will Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 be this October I wonder?). Middle-earth Shadow of War rockets to 95GB when you bolt the high-res texture pack on, and for what it's worth, base Grand Theft Auto 5 is 76GB, and Ark is 70GB.
They're all names which popped up in a Reddit thread, several months old now, where commenters debated the biggest game installs. Other names mentioned there belong to Microsoft's Xbox One X stable of games. Wesley wrote about the "eye-watering" 4K Xbox One X download sizes he encountered last autumn. And it's here, finally, we find a game to dethrone Final Fantasy 15 on PC.
It's not Gears of War 4, which measured 110GB for me just now, nor Halo 5, at around 113GB with the 4K update, but a bit of a cheater in Quantum Break, which when you add the optional TV show balloons to nearly 180GB.
Mind you, if you start including optional add-ons then apparently the high resolution satellite imagery you can download for flight sim Xplane 11 can apparently push file sizes into terabytes.
I think I'll just stick with the charming 177MB Into the Breach instead.
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