Apex Legends' latest season released November 2, bringing with it anew map, Legend, and weaponas well as various balancing changes and a new hop-up. So far the game has performed well, and players have not been experiencing the launch issues of seasons prior that caused seemingly infinite loading screens and locked many out from playing during the first day or so of new content drops.
This season continues the trend started withSeason 10 Emergence, by maintaining steady servers at launch and allowing everyone a chance at trying the game out on day one. However, when it comes to this season, at least for Xbox players, that does come with one caveat.
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Xbox players found yesterday that playing the seasonal update required a 72 GB download, essentially a re-download of the entire game, plus the new update. For comparison,the PlayStation updatefile size was 43 GB, while the Origin and Steam sizes were 18 GB and 9 GB respectively. For those with low-speed internet, this meant that the game would take significantly longer to download than they thought, causing them to take to Twitter and Reddit to voice their complaints.
For live-service games, especially on consoles, updates are often pushed out that include older files bundled in with the new patches. Sometimes that necessitates a full re-download on the players' part to ensure that the older parts of the game mesh with the new ones. Even on PlayStation, the actual size of the patch itself is nowhere near 43 GB, and is likely closer to that of the PC updates. Although it is unfortunate, in the end it does not result in the actual file size of the game increasing by 72 GB on Xbox or 43 GB on PlayStation consoles.
Respawn Entertainment has not officially commented on why download sizes are so large on consoles compared to PCs, but it is likely that the reasons above can explain it, as well as difficulties with file compression on Xbox and PlayStation that may not exist on PC. Whatever the case, console players had to wait a little longer to boot upApex Legends, play as Ash, and explore the new map of Storm Point if they did not pre-load the update.
In the future, maybe Respawn will find a way to slim down the file size on patches like these for console gamers, but it is doubtful that they will reach sizes as small as the PC updates any time soon.
Apex Legendsis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
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