Metroid Dread is almost here and understandably, folks are excited. But unless you buy a physical copy, before you can play Dread, you’ll need to download it. Luckily, Nintendo has compressed this next epic chapter in the Metroid saga into a teeny-tiny package. In fact, its total file size of 4.1GB is smaller than your average Call of Duty update.
This information comes via the official Nintendo store page for the upcoming Metroid Dread, and was spotted by various outlets and users online. Over on the page, Nintendo lists the total file size for the game as an astoundingly small 4.1GB. That’s everything. The entire game. All compressed and squished down to an itty-bitty size, like Samus in her morph ball form. In comparison, some past updates for Call of Duty Warzone have exceeded 10GB alone. Some have even hit 20GB or more. And Call of Duty isn’t the only franchise with massive updates. Red Dead Online has seen 5GB+ updates in the past year or so, and Cyberpunk 2077 got a 16GB patch in early 2021.
That’s just the size of some updates for these games. The total size of installed games is also getting out of hand, as we’ve covered in the past. Your average Call of Duty now takes up a huge amount of space on your HDD or SSD. Big games like The Last of Us, GTA Online, Destiny 2, Hitman 3, and more exceed 50GB. In some cases, they even exceed 75 or 100GB. And while some devs have tried to shrink games down a bit, it’s still ridiculous just how big some games have gotten.
Making Dread’s compact size more impressive, it appears that Nintendo at one point estimated it to be larger, at about 6.9GB. Since then, with launch imminent, a smaller and we assume more accurate number of just 4GB has been posted to the store page.
MercuryStream and Nintendo’s Metroid Dread returns the series to its 2D roots and is also a direct sequel to Metroid Fusion. It once again stars Samus Aran, this time finding her stranded on the planet ZDR where she’s gone to investigate signs of the deadly “X” parasite. While it’s true that Dread isn’t a 4K graphical powerhouse, it will probably be a great game that people enjoy for hours and hours.
Given that it’s still expensive to buy the SSDs needed to upgrade the storage capacity of next-gen machines, it might be nice to see more devs trying to compress and better optimise the file size of bigger games. I don’t think anyone really wants a future where new games are taking up 2TB or more of space. At least, I don’t want that.
Metroid Dread hits Nintendo Switch on October 8, 2021. You’ll probably have the space to download it.
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