Rainbow Six Siege has surpassed 20 million registered players and is now "here to stay", so reckons Ubisoft. To this end, as part of its long-term update strategy, the developer has announced a "data cleanup" of sorts that requires a pretty hefty patch on PC. How hefty? Up to 42GB.
Pretty substantial, then, but necessary as the Y2S3.0 (Year two, season three) patch will reset the "foundation that future patches are built upon", and will help establish a new "baseline" the developer will update the game client from hereon.
"All game data is stored in what we refer to as a 'forge'," says Ubisoft via the game's site. "This is a compressed archive containing other files. When we need to modify a file that is part of a forge, we simply download a new forge that contains the new file without replacing the original forge. This simplifies the patching process, and reduces the download size. Over time however, it leads to a lot of wasted space on disk, as there are more and more modified files."
The post continues to delve into the more technical aspects of Y2S3.0's makeup, however besides visual improvements, the patch will also result in smaller patches moving forward (approximately 12-15 percent smaller) and will boost load times. Speaking to the latter, Ubi reckons this will be around 10 percent to the good for console players however notes it's "difficult to determine" an exact figure on PC.
Ta, Eurogamer.
