Like many others, I have just purchased the digital version of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my switch. I paid for the game, left the eShop, then the download just…started. No prompts to delete something else to make room. No minor crisis deciding which of the half dozen unfinished games on my console would get the boot. The download finished quickly, then I started playing. Simple, right? And yet, I can’t remember the last time the installation of one of the biggest games of the year went so well.
Week in Games: Return to Hyrule
Monday 3:53 p.m.
Most modern blockbusters have file sizes of at least 50 GB. The biggest ones are more than 100 GB, or even well beyond. With standard PS5 and Xbox Series X storage drives of just 500GB, with even less space available just to store games, it doesn’t take long to download the next hit, or even a small indie game, which causes headaches. Do I really have time to replay The Witcher 3 right away? should i put God of War Ragnarök waiting while i finish Forbidden Horizon WestIt is burning shores Downloadable content? What if I just played one more hour of the latest random 2D Soulslike I downloaded before deleting it?
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor threw that whole gauntlet into overdrive. The game was huge. The patches were huge. THE patches kept coming. I love what I’ve played so far, but man, this whole part sucks. God help you if you also have an online multiplayer game that you regularly jump into like Destiny 2, Apex LegendsOr Fortnite. And if it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2well, all i can say is i’m sorry.
Hence the surge of relief when I installed tears of the kingdom and didn’t have to deal with any of that. I have a 128GB microSD in my Switch and have never pressed against the invisible barrier of its storage limits. Nintendo is renowned for optimizing its Switch games, with file sizes typically half of what ports like Loss 2016 requires. tears of the kingdom is no larger than a gigabyte breath of the wild, despite a whole new crafting system, a much bigger map, and a ton more voice acting. It’s a little marvel that I appreciate more than ever. And the day-one patch of version 1.1? Barely 300 MB.
I understand. With 4K textures, mountains of cinematics and full voice acting, cutting-edge blockbusters on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC will never be smaller. External storage add-ons are also getting cheaper, alleviating concerns for those who can afford them. And maybe one day all of our games will be streamed from the cloud anyway, making local storage obsolete. In the meantime, I don’t take small game footprints for granted.
Something seems a little old-school tears of the kingdom, and it’s not just that this is the new adventure of some of Nintendo’s oldest characters. Midnight launch. THE lines wrapped around the block. The fact that an increasingly fractured, fragmented, and heated gaming culture momentarily focuses on Link sticking rockets onto a raft. It’s good. Also, the game just works. Amazing.
