I often shy away from games with humongous download sizes like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. The game's size is confirmed to be a staggering 147GB on PlayStation 5 (and slightly smaller on PC and Xbox Series with 155 and 147GB respectively), but instead of jumping for joy and eagerly awaiting the pre-load time, I feel like my PS5 is grumbling in discontent, fuming at the thought of swallowing such a colossal game and endangering my current beloved library. Already I'm having to plan accommodating it, wondering what I'll have to give up in order to play this new colossus.
Although the PS5 comes equipped with a bountiful 875GB SSD, only 667.2GB is actually available for use, as the rest is dedicated to the system, so what seems like nearly 1TB actually swings closer to 'a bit over 500GB.' This translates to Star Wars taking up at least 22% of the total storage capacity, or one-fifth of the entire drive space.
For me, games these days are not just a simple activity to breeze through. Instead, each one is an integral part of my personalized gaming ecosystem, which I build one piece at a time like a mosaic inside my PlayStation hub, and 150GB is like smashing a boulder right into the middle of it. I still keep around games such as Like A Dragon: Ishin! (37 GB) for an occasional round of Karaoke, Mahjong, and Shogi, and Persona 5 (41.54 GB) for its addictive motion darts minigame and soundtracks (and because I just love it that much). Meanwhile, other games, such as Returnal (66.55 GB) and Doom Eternal (84.04 GB), satisfy my craving for short-lived action-packed thrills, so it's hard to part with them.
Additionally, since Resident Evil Village (32.26 GB) and Resident Evil 4 Remake (58.4 GB) are arguably the main attractions of my recent PSVR 2 purchase, I have no intention of deleting them anytime soon. My point is, some games are just here to stay, and for many reasons unique to each ome and my own preferences, I'm not prepared to swap them out every time a new one arrives.
With around 360 GB of storage already filled, there remains 307.5 GB for Survivor to hone its place. However, Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service is always there, anlways beckoning me to new gaming experiences aren't limited to new releases like Survivor. There are games like Ghostwire: Tokyo (~20 GB), Sackboy: A Big Adventure (31.5 GB), and Horizon Forbidden West (~100 GB) serving as examples of why someone would obtain a PS5 console, thanks to their support of exclusive features like Haptic Feedback and Tempest 3D audio, or new DLC expansions exclusive to the console. And let's not forget about the ongoing online experiences–at least the ones I am interested in–like Genshin Impact (+30 GB) and Final Fantasy 14 (+80 GB).
To sum up, the ever-increasing size of video games is starting to feel constricting and uncomfortable for me (especially living in Egypt, where I have a measly 140GB monthly download cap, 1MB/s download speeds). Adding an external hard drive would alleviate the concern for a while before it loops back to the same issue, and the impending release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor only adds to this problem.
Is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor doing something wrong or investing its size in the wrong place? Probably not, and I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the developers who have to compete under an ever-growing pinnacle of excellence, dependent on high-resolution and complex 3D textures (as well as uncompressed audio files) that make up so much of the size of any game.
Yet even those these minutiae make up so much of a game's size, those aren't the things that stick with us when we play them. Even the so-called next-gen upgrades for The Witcher 3 were merely a tool for our Rob Zak to circle in on what's really important - the adventures he got caught up in inside Novigrad, the memorable side-quests and the carefully constructed ambience that's enthralling him in its world.
That's why I believe that, no matter how large or ambitious a game is, players will always be able to look beyond all the stunning textures and gigantic architecture and find the things that really matter. I wish that AAA developers and publishers could believe in us in the same way. In my case, many games have a special place on my PS5 for subtle reasons that don't even get mentioned in any technical showcase, and won't ever be.
Survivor doesn't really have to push itself to imaginary standards (as symbolized by its surreal size that's triple the amount of its predecessor). All it has to do is give us another round of Fallen Order's Metroidvania-esque world and planetary-level orchestral soundtrack. If it did that, I'm confident that its essence–not size or grandeur–would've always found its way to my PS5. As things stand, there's literally no room for it in my life, and that's a shame.