Fallout 4's Install Size Revealed

Bethesda has officially revealed the install size for Fallout 4 on the Xbox One. The game clocks in at a rather paltry 28gb as a download. That's all the space you'll need to install the game on your hard drive.

Game Informer picked up the news from over on the Xbox.com website where they revealed the requirements for installing the game.

It's revealed that the game will take up approximately 28.12 gigabytes. That's not too bad given that some games out there, such as GTA V on PC, will take up like 60gb worth of space. Essentially Fallout 4 is only half the size of Rockstar's HD rendition of their open-world action title.

The revelation of the game size probably comes as a surprise to many, given that Fallout 4 is expected to be an absolutely massive game. However, Bethesda doesn't appear to be pouring a whole lot of their attention into the graphics so much as they are the gameplay content. Texture resolutions, geometry density and even detailed light rendering maps can sometimes take up a heck of a lot of memory (especially if the light maps are pre-baked). But in this case it looks like Bethesda worked some compression magic for Fallout 4 to keep the game as lean and as mean as possible.

That level of efficiency is always appreciated.

Now some people might assume that the game only being 28gb means it's tiny or that Bethesda gimped on the content. It's easy to assume that when you compare it to a beast like GTA V that clocks in at 60gb, but keep in mind that Fallout 4 doesn't have a lot of needless civilian dialogue to take up more than 10gb alone and it doesn't have three different protagonists with several gigabytes worth of speech data.

There's a lot of bloat attached to GTA V, where-as in the case of Fallout 4 a lot of the game's weight in hard drive space comes from all of the different interactive entities in the game. There are a ton of objects littered throughout the game world and many of them can be used for crafting and upgrading your equipment and character, and there aren't any vehicles that you have to worry about where they take up so much memory due to sounds, damage data, liveries and physics. So when you actually look at it there's a plausible reason why Fallout 4 is a lot smaller than GTA V in regards to space and it doesn't by any stretch of the imagination mean that it's a smaller game in terms of gameplay content or interactivity.

This news about the size comes shortly on the heels of Bethesda laying out details on the game's skills and perk system. It was revealed that there are no level caps in Fallout 4... you can just keep on playing and leveling up until you get bored with the game. And I tend to doubt that die-hards will get bored anytime soon given that mods are already in the works and mods will be making their way to the Xbox One and PS4.

The system specs for Fallout 4 haven't been revealed just yet for PC, but I imagine they'll be coming soon. It will be interesting to see if the game will have a bump up in its total size on PC compared to the home console counterparts.