During a talk held by Bandai Namco at CEDEC 2019 last week, an interesting little tidbit of information has surfaced which reveals that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's file size reached as high as 60GB during development.
Bandai, which developed the game alongside Sora Ltd, says that their file size reduction methods helped the game to become just 15GB by Version 4.0.0, reducing costs and paving the way for new possibilities when it comes to game compression. Even the largest of the Switch's Nintendo-published games only tend to sit somewhere close to 10 or 15GB, so 60GB would have come as quite a shock to players.
On rival systems, it's not uncommon for digital games to use upwards of 50GB of space, but Nintendo's use of compression has always been impressive and that seems to radiate to external studios working on major Nintendo games. You could argue that there's more of a need to compress games in this manner when developing for Switch - what with its use of cartridges and very little internal memory - but we're thankful that we're not having to shell out for a new microSD card for every other game.
The Bandai Namco talk also covered info on the game's art and use of assets during development; you can read the full write up courtesy of Siliconera here.
[source siliconera.com]
Comments 30
You know what other Bandai Namco game is a whopping 60GB? Tekken 7. This article is clearly confirmation that Captain Falcon is gonna be the next announced Tekken DLC character.
Not surprising it reached a 60GB in size, it takes almost nothing, like dropping a few new assets, for a game's file size to soar to new heights XD
But what will always remain amazing is how much Nintendo care, and most importantly succeed, in crushing down those GB.
Yup, Nintendo proving they are masters of compression once again. 👍
The increases in storage space for both optical media and hard drives on consoles and PCs has lead to developers getting complacent in how big textures and audio files are. Why optimize when you can just let it fill up a lot of space on the user's hard drive, or need a ton of bandwidth when downloading digitally?
The compression being used on Smash Bros is truly impressive for sure. Of course, the files are decompressed when loaded into memory so you don't necessarily see the impact, this isn't like saving lower quality textures or audio files.
The technical mumbo jumbo mostly eludes me, but I understand little enough to know it's amazing
Reminds me of those studios that ported other consoles' games to the Switch
Plus it's loading very fast comparing to other games:)
A couple days ago I showed my friend how afwul SNK heroines were...
It took a battle to load about 3-5 times longer than Smash.
And it looks like a mess
Why not everyone optimize their games like that. Huge games are incredibly damaging for hard drives and since people have to buy hard drives more often it hurts the planet.
i would love to see all those nintendo games with their original (or at least less compressed) asssets on powerful hardware in 4K
Nintendo games usually take up very little space.
Isn't Super Mario World 3D on Wii U only like 1.5GB?
Zelda BOTW and Xenoblade is huge and have far more assets, and is why they are big.
That's the normal size for games on Xbox and Playstation. Red Dead 2 is over 100GB.
GTA 6 on PS5 will most likely be 1TB in size. PS5 supports 8K, can you imagine the textures needed for that resolution?
@nintendolie
Battlefied 1, Elder Scrolls Online, Gears 4, GT Sport and many others is 100.GB now. Some ~130.GB games is installed on my PS4 and Xbox One.
That's why i have 6.5TB for my Xbox One X, and 4.5 TB of space on PS4.
Xbox One X needs 4K assets on a few games which requires even more space. Many games have 4K Assetts separately on PC too.
They need to share their secrets with devs
Why can't others Devs learn to do this?
Once again, Nintendo proves that less is more.
Nintendo's use of compression remains amazing. I don't know how they manage to keep file sizes down like they do. Games on other consoles are 50+ GB by default now with big ones will over 100GB. Nintendo doesn't need all the 4k assets and multi-channel audio those consoles are using, so that allows them to eliminate a lot of extra space, but still, their reductions remain astounding.
@nintendolie Yeah I really don't get how console makers are hoping to bridge "8k" with "we want digital everything". I suppose the push to streaming is part of that, but geeze, the internet is not designed for every household to be pulling terabytes of data on a daily basis. It barely supports commercial users doing that. In the US, the #1 ISP is Comcast, Terabyte sized games would use up most users monthly limit in a single game download before they start paying huge overages.
Much as I hate class action suits, honestly I think it's time for class action against media companies abusing the network infrastructure. They push huge downloads to consumers expecting telecom just goes into debut funding their cash cow.
@Edu23XWiiU yes with less sound/image quality. LMAO
And here battlefront 2 is taking over 100gb on my ps4. Dang it EA...
While I'm not too big a fan of their audio compression, (especially when its 1000 song soundtrack spanning most of video game history was a major selling point) luckily we have fan audio engineers who have restored most of them to better glory in the Super Smash Bros. Anthology.
I would have liked for them not to cut certain songs down. I would have put up with the extra GB it cost
I would say its not as much impressive that Nintendo uses compression but more disappointing that other developers, especially on other platforms do not. I played Shadow of War recently on PC and it was 100 GB and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what could be using up all that space other than simply uncompressed assets.
Amazing how SNES games were mostly 1 to 4 megabytes while even NES styled retro games today use 50-500 or more, though thats less about compression and more about how those old consoles handled music and sprites.
@cryptologous But that means Tekken 7 will have to come to Swi... OH MY GOD YES!!!!!!
@MarioFan02 Heihachi Mishima for Smash?
It's amazing how they managed to fit soo much music in such little size.
But I guess the downside is, since the music format is unknown and not yet understood, decent music mods aren't a possibility yet :<
@MarioFan02 been the number one game on my Switch wish list since the console was announced
@NEStalgia he's kinda in the game already so it makes me wonder if maybe someone else like Jin or Kazuya will make it as a playable character
@cryptologous Sakurai likes toying with people. It'll be Asuka.
Or Kuma...
@NEStalgia Asuka would ruin me. I think the characters best suited to Smash's gameplay would probably be Devil Jin (smash attacks covered with laser scraper, hellsweep, the electric, twin pistons, specials covered with his laser eyes, heavens gate, parries, tilts being generic Tekken tools), Paul (could essentially work like a middle ground between Falcon and Ganon with his deathfist and heavy hitting tools), Law (honestly surprised he hasn't been added to a Smash game already, near infinite possibilities for a Smash moveset, his animations are quite cartoonish so he'd blend in well with some visual tweaking, sounds funny), Yoshimitsu (probably unlikely given he's already in SC but easily the highest amount of possibilities for any Tekken character, could be like Joker in that he ostensibly has two move lists [one with sword, one without, down B to swap?], has enough cool moves that'd work in Smash to fill out half a dozen characters) or Alisa (lots of room to mess around with the implications of her design; she could have a lot of interesting aerial options utilising her boosters and could similarly have a split move list like Yoshi, or specifically bring out the chainsaws for Smash attacks).
But yea, the man isn't stumped for options. Even if Kuma or Asuka were picked, I wouldn't complain; Sakurai makes every character that makes it to Smash a joy to play as far as I'm concerned.
@Alucard83 smash Bros is 1080p, 60 FPS, and it looks great. Get lost.
I wonder if there were things initially carried over from Smash Wii U/3DS that are no longer in the game that could have added to that bloat. Like Smash Tour, Smash Run, Master Orders, Crazy Orders, all the trophies, Break the Targets, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if that is the case as they clearly worked with Smash Wii U as a base for the game. That being said, I do hope that at least one of those missing modes returns, namely Smash Run. I know Sakurai said that Home Run Contest was pretty much it for new modes, but that wording, "pretty much" does leave a little wiggle room for the possibility that maybe one more title could still come as a surprise. And if so, I so so so hope it is Smash Run.
@duffmmann would love a co-op world of light
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