If you played in last weekend’s Diablo 4 early access beta period, particularly on PC, you’ll likely be aware that it came with a hefty 80GB download size. If you, like me, winced at the size of what is essentially a vertical slice of a much larger game, there’s actually a way for PC players to cut it down.
So, bad news first: to save a bit of space, you’re still going to have to download the full 80GB beta. I’m sorry. I know. Bit painful and a roundabout way of doing things, but hear me out because here’s the good news: once you have it downloaded, you don’t need to keep all of it on your drive. Once the beta installation completes, click the Settings cog next to the play button in your Battle.net launcher and click Modify Install. This will open the Modify Installation menu, on which you should see two options: Game Content and Default Langauge. Under the Game Content heading you’ll see the available contents: Base Game (required) and High-Resolution Assets. Click the Modify Install button to the right, and a checkbox for installing those High-Resolution Assets will appear.
Unchecking this box cuts the total installation size in half, reducing it to a much more manageable 40 GB.
Obviously, if you want the Diablo 4 open beta to look its best, or you absolutely have to have it running in 4K for the flex, then leave the high res textures right where they are. If you’ll be running it at 1920×1080 like a normal person and you’d prefer to save a bit of space, now you can claw a bit of your drive back without having to uninstall the whole thing.
For those of us that game on PC’s with limited space, juggling games to make digital ends meet, the Diablo 4 beta and its hidden file size reducer is a godsend. Of course, it would have been nice if Blizzard could have had the high-resolution textures option appear at the front end of the installation rather than hide it away in the uninstall menu but, unfortunately, the Battle.net app doesn’t really work that way.
Enjoy the beta, adventurers.
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