Mega-download —

A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

Retail edition requires 20GB day-one download rather than a second Blu-ray disc.

Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship <i>Master Chief Collection</i> in a "car full of 5.25" disks" format.
Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship Master Chief Collection in a "car full of 5.25" disks" format.

About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall. Game size inflation hasn't exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month.

Buried in Friday's official "gone gold" announcement was word that the Xbox One's remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one "content update" to access "some features and multiplayer content." Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says.

Why make even retail buyers download so much data? "The game is designed to run as a single, unified product," 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O'Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend. "Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound." While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O'Connor elaborated that such a solution "simply wasn't practical for this product, this year in this timeline."

"Do I understand the inconvenience and annoyance for some users? Of course," he continued. "I'm not going to blow smoke or ignore it. For some folks it will be straight up annoying and I both apologize unreservedly for the irritance, and hope that the package and the way it works more than makes up for it."

Regardless of the format, Master Chief Collection will require players to set up a full 13 percent of their built-in Xbox One hard drives; a system without external storage could hold less than eight games at that size. Xbox One owners shouldn't feel too bad though: the "large" 32GB Wii U couldn't even hold half of a game this size without an external hard drive. Maybe we should just be relieved that the game isn't shipping on 89 CD-ROMs, or on 46,222 3.5-inch floppy disks.

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Channel Ars Technica