Respawn Actually Explains Why Titanfall's Install Is So Huge
The bigger they are...
Have you purchased Titanfall? Are you attempting to install it right this very second? Did you read that previous sentence and think, "Pfft, right this very second? More like, 'right this very nine hours'"? Then you are probably aware that Titanfall - much like the lumbering mechanical monstrosities that inhabit it - is GIANT. 49 GB, to be precise. I just assumed it was a matter of poor compression, and apparently I was not wrong. Turns out, however, that Respawn choice to let Titanfall's girth frolic free for a reason.
Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker explained the method behind the seeming madness to Eurogamer:
"We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio."
"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 end result? 35 GB of uncompressed audio, which - while a rather obnoxious hassle to set up - makes the game run much better, according to Baker.
So I suppose that makes sense, but I'm no engineer, so I can't verify it one way or the other. As someone with a high-end machine I do ultimately end up inconvenienced, but I also get more people to play with/against, so I can't begrudge Respawn too much on this one.
I do wish there was a better solution to this issue, though. Engineer-types in the audience, is there? Could computer magic give lower-end players optimal performance without leaving a footprint the size of Bigfoot's larger cousin (named Tim) on my hard drive?
Jim's note: Apparently this includes all the localised audio versions of everything, which seems a bit silly. You aren't going to need to switch languages after you installed to your preferred language, surely?