Hitman 3 is going to be an enormous PC game—at least if you own Hitman 1 and 2, which Hitman 3 can import to bring the entire trilogy into a single package. That sounds like a recipe for an install size big enough to make an SSD cry, because Hitman 2, with the first game's levels imported, is currently 149 gigabytes. Hitman 2 is one of
the mightiest storage hogs on PC, second only to Call of Duty. But last week,
we reported that Hitman 3 will actually shrink instead of grow, retroactively optimizing the first two Hitman games into a dramatically smaller package. How did IO Interactive manage to cut the total install size
in half?
"With all content installed (including the locations from H1+H2), we’re expecting Hitman 3 to clock in at approximately 60-70 GB and we're really happy with that," IO Interactive's chief technology officer Maurizo De Pascale told me over email.
Even without the older games bundled in, Hitman 3 is a leaner install than IO has managed to pull off with its last two games. As De Pascale explained to me, the answer is simple: More compression. But why Hitman 3's compression is so effective, and why they didn't use the same techniques last time, is where it gets more complicated (and more interesting).
Hitman 3 uses a technique called
LZ4 compression that's been around for about a decade. Almost everything in the game runs through this compression algorithm, which is especially efficient.
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