Killzone: Shadow Fall

The vaunted digital future is going to result in some big bandwidth bills for its supporters. Speculation pegged Killzone: Shadow Fall’s digital footprint at a whopping 50GB earlier in the year, but Guerrilla Games has clarified that the final sum is a no-less terrifying 39.7GB. The good news is that, using the platform holder’s new PlayGo technology, you’ll be able to start playing after pulling 7.5GB of data off the PlayStation Network – and it’s something that the Dutch developer hopes to improve upon in the future.

“Realistically, I think that a lot of people can do this – it’s just that the initial chunk of 7.5GB is quite big,” technical director Michiel van der Leeuw told Eurogamer.net. “I think that next time around we'll try to see if we can design something that doesn't jeopardise the game which will make it even friendlier. But I think that all things considered, this being launch and we've got like 2 minutes 44 seconds from disc to the first level and no installs, I think that it's already a massive improvement over previous generations.”

The time that it takes to actually get into the game is something that the studio’s worked hard on – be it the digital or physical version. The team has eliminated in-game load screens, and completely removed all logos from the title’s startup sequence. “We had to ask legal and Dolby, the epilepsy warning stuff, the logos from Havok – we had to negotiate with them that we could put it in the credits and not the title screen,” van der Leeuw explained.

The result is something that the employee’s personally very pleased with. “I get as annoyed by all these screens as you do,” he continued. “I'm 36, I don't have a lot of time to game, when I do I don't want be distracted by things that have nothing to do with playing the game. We came from a day and age with a cartridge, you stuck it in and like, 'bleep!', and you were playing the game. And slowly that has degenerated into experiences which are more beautiful and big and prestigious, but they feel... heavy.”

It’s certainly an enormous change from the PlayStation 3, which would often pause for minutes at a time to install data before letting you play. Even with Sony’s new PlayGo functionality, though, it seems that your longest delays will now come from trying to pull enormous amounts of data from the PlayStation Network. The big question is: are you still willing to embrace the digital future now that you have an idea of the file sizes involved? Break your data cap in the comments section below.

[source eurogamer.net]