Titanfall is upon us, and that means Respawn's fast-paced FPS has high-fived Spyglass for luck before dropping onto many a hard drive with a 48GB shockwave. That's a staggering size for a strictly multiplayer shooter, and many pilots want to know the reasons behind the significant storage chunk. Speaking to Eurogamer , Respawn Lead Engineer Richard Baker provides an answer: uncompressed audio.
35GB of uncompressed audio, in fact. As Baker explains, the intent was to shore up CPU resources on lower-end PCs to tackle Titanfall's wide range of gunshots, ambient noise, and robot warcries without taking a hit on performance. That meant packaging purer and less system-heavy sounds with the roughly 13GB of map and visual data.
"We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it," Baker elaborates. "We probably could've had audio decompress off disc, but we were a little worried about minimum spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio.
He continues: "So, it's almost all audio. On a higher PC, it wouldn't be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn't be an issue. It's that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn't dedicate those resources to audio."
The results are there for all to see in Titanfall's rather undemanding requirements , and it's nice to have a better idea of what's gobbling up our drive space. We're in the thick of an in-progress review for Titanfall, but so far, it looks and plays like one of this year's best releases.
