Rare has announced that an upcoming Sea of Thieves update will tackle an unconventional foe: the game’s install size. Starting in February, all versions of Sea of Thieves will see their total install size reduced. Along with using up less room on a player’s preferred platform, Rare says the update will have several other benefits.
Sea of Thieves Reduced Game Install Size
Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate confirmed the upcoming install size reduction via this post on the game’s website. According to Neate’s post, the update will be deployed on Wednesday, February 6. Once the update is installed, players should see their install size reduced to the following amounts:
- Xbox One: 10GB down from 35GB
- Xbox One X: 25GB down from 47GB
- Windows 10 PC: 27GB down from 47GB
As Neate also explains, the install size reduction will enable a number of additional benefits:
“Changes to how we generate game updates/patches will better enable us to manage future content being added to the game. This might mean that patch sizes increase slightly in the future, but the benefit is that the game install size won’t increase significantly. If we didn’t make this change, the game install size would continue to increase, taking up more and more of your hard drive space.
Due to the game install changing, we’ll be able to more quickly generate and transfer builds which is a significant part of day-to-day development internally at Rare. It’ll mean improvements to various areas of our development process, including how quickly we can generate builds and ship them to players.”
Neate also noted that the update will trigger a full game reinstall so players should plan accordingly. Moving forward, the update should ensure that Rare is able to develop and deploy new game builds more frequently.
Meanwhile, Rare is also working on Sea of Thieves’ first major expansion of 2019 titled Arena. The game received several expansions last year, including the danger-fraught Forsaken Shores.
Source: Kotaku