Titanfall To Take Up Titanic Amounts Of Hard Drive Space

Man, giant robots are such a hassle. They break everything, have no regard for my pristine white polar bear rug, and - oh yeah - they're really goddamn big. Too big to fit in closets, on airplanes, or, apparently, on hard drives. That's the only explanation I can muster for Titanfall's whopping 48 gigabyte hard drive requirement, given that it's multiplayer-only, not exactly the nexest of "next-gen" games from a graphical standpoint, and isn't utterly ridden with cut-scenes like, say, Max Payne 3. But then, maybe I'm jumping the sedan-sized gun on this one. After all, the exact nuts and bolts of Titanfall's multiplayer story are still shrouded in mystery. Which is to say, a giant robot is standing in front of them, and it won't get out of the way.

Respawn head honcho Vince Zampella revealed Titanfall's scale-tipping size on Twitter, but he did offer one additional detail to lighten the load: the download will only be 21 GB. Now, using "only" in this case might seem a little absurd, but that's where we're at with major triple-A releases these days. At least we're not pulling down all 48 GB unfiltered.

48 GB is pretty sizable chunk of data to have sitting in storage, though. Admittedly, we live in an age where it's not particularly expensive to obtain 1000 GB of space, so it's hardly the end of the world. More than anything, it's just inconvenient, especially when we start factoring in things like solid state drives. Perhaps Respawn has a perfectly valid reason for Titanfall's heavyweight elbow drop onto our machines, but if this is just a case of poor data compression, well, color me peeved.

If you're curious, here are the rest of Titanfall's minimum system requirements:

• OS: 64-bit Windows 7, 8, 8.1
• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 2.8GHz or Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
• Memory: 4GB RAM
• GPU: 512MB VRAM, Radeon HD 4770 or GeForce 8800GT

Titanfall will be out next month. Graham and I both played the beta pretty extensively, and I recorded a bunch of my time with it. Graham's piece sums up the RPS mothership hivemind mothermind hiveship's collective concerns best, though, so definitely give that a read.