Star Citizen has a huge scope, and as such, it's going to be a very big game—physically, that is to say. Star Citizen's director of game operations, Jeremy Masker, revealed that the final release of the game may be at least 100GB in size—compressed.
A fan on the game's official forums had initially suggested that the game would be 30 to 40 gigs in size, and that it would be more compressed and optimized than current modules currently are. This isn't the case, responded Masker, who said that the game's compression and asset removal would be unlikely to bring the game down to a size of a more reasonable 40GB.
"As I have already said, I would not count on this," he said in response to the fan. (via PC Gamer) "The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB."
"Also, yes we are optimizing game patching for speed and to only deliver diffs, but this is unlikely to reduce actual patch size," he continued. "Again, each patch has 100s of assets, each of these assets are at times 200mb, this leads to 2-6gb patches, and if we end up doing a file type re-factor and have to re-download 30-40% of the assets on the hard-drive, then the patch will be 14-20gb."
This might not be a big deal to anyone with high-speed fiber optic internet connections, but it's definitely going to prove to be difficult for anyone with download caps (like anyone living in Australia) or slow internet connections. It'll be interesting to see how Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries tackle the problem as the game nears release.
