Hi, Rare, anyway to make this game smaller? Its 115GB already.

First game you downloaded that didnt increase with more and more content?

@kakaroto9766 said in Hi, Rare, anyway to make this game smaller? Its 115GB already.:

@burnbacon Fornite which has thousands more skins is 69 gb.
Why are people always blindly defending companies? -.-

Developers CAN optimize. CAN Make them faster CAN make them lighter, but they dont, and partially because of people who defend their lazy practices.

If someone complains about how buggy is SoT, should we say "First game you ever play with bugs?"

Theres a difference between this and fortnite, namely that new content is not just cosmetics, but also entirely new mechanics. Fortnite new content tends to just be cosmetics and slight world changes, with very small mechanical changes.

When 2 games prioritize completely different things for content, they cant exactly be compared, especially on file size considering the type of content you add is going to make a big difference. Its not blindly defending a company, its an understanding that mechanical additions dont compare to different skins and map changes, thats common sense.

Different games work different ways, and sea of thieves compares in literally no way to fortnite other than both of them have cosmetics, beyond that, all similarities end.

I would have to question why Fortnite is being used as the yardstick in this conversation when the games are very different, with very different goals. Cartoony visuals aside, there's little similarity is design or content.

Sea of Thieves also has a larger focus on audio design and audio take up a large chunk of its data (the audio has already been compressed to the edge of artifacting, by the way, and I'd rather they don't decrease its quality further).

Add to that that both run on different engines, and perhaps UE5 is much better than UE4 at decompressing assets on the fly. I don't know much about that aspect of UE5, to be honest. A large reason why games are larger on PC is down to decompression, which consoles just do better, as they're designed around doing it (that's why PC games have stutter issues with a lot of games). Epic also built the engine, so they're going to be the best at optimising for it, so that has to be taken into consideration.

In general though, games are getting larger and larger and 115GB in 2025 isn't all that shocking for a game of this size. When the Anniversary edition was released in 2019, the game was already optimised for future updates to reduce size - so just be thankful it's not much, much larger.

Is it defending the devs? Kinda... but also it's acknowledging that game development isn't easy and I'm sure they're always looking at ways to decrease the game size without compromising performance, which decompression can do drastically. And the game health is already suffering enough as is.

No developer wants their game to be larger than it needs to be, as that not only means it takes up a lot of space, but it can hinder folks downloading it on slower connections and, therefore, may impact potential sales.

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Edit: Also, I just checked and Fortnite is not only 70GB to install, it's ~110GB to download and requires ~120GB space.

The Monkey Island and Pirates Life tall tales have a lot of unique assets that aren't used in the main game, big instanced maps in both of them for example. And the area north of Smugglers bay and the underground place to the west off the map for the pirates life tales. All random bloat you play through a couple times at most.

It's no secret that a big turn off for potential players in Sea of Thieves is the game size and how much storage it takes up, It would be nice to make the game smaller regardless how its done one of the main reasons I cant get friends to play with me is because the game takes up to much storage it just seems western games are getting bigger as compared to their eastern counterparts not all that educated on why that is or what's done differently in the process its just an observation

The game clearly has a problem with the optimization of its volume and the developers simply do not know how to fix it.

What is SoT?
It is an empty map, if I am not mistaken there are 6 ships on the server.
Will creatures and objects be loaded in any way only when approaching the island and in the player's direct line of sight.

Many mechanics? Of course not, it's just ridiculous.
There is fishing and hunting for megalodon, emissaries, piracy, events - ghost ships, and skeletons on the islands, which are always there anyway.

I played about 200 hours, but in fact, apart from endless and monotonous farming, there is nothing, although the game could have had huge potential. All actions are similar everywhere. Find a pixel and hand it in. There are no differences.

And we look at open world games, which are more detailed, there is a huge number of mechanics, modes, items, external decorations, but they take up less space.