Metroid Dread is Only 4.1 GB in Size - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 October 2021 / 4,914 Views
Publisher Nintendo and developer MercurySteam have updated the Nintendo eShop page for Metroid Dread ahead of its launch for the Nintendo Switch on Friday, October 8.
The updated eShop page for the action-adventure game reveals the file size is only 4.1 GB. Nintendo Switch games tend to be far smaller than games on PlayStation or Xbox consoles, however, at 4.1 GB that is smaller than several other Nintendo titles.
Metroid Dread also supports Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, English languages.
View a trailer of the game below:
Here is an overview of the game:
Who is that enemy attacking Samus at the start of the trailer? Is that… a living Chozo? The Chozo are highly intelligent and technologically advanced species who wish to bring peace to the galaxy. But a living Chozo is a very rare sight—especially one attacking Samus!
More about this mysterious figure will be revealed when the Metroid Dread game launches for the Nintendo Switch family of systems on October 8.
But that wasn’t all the trailer covered! The sneak peek also unveiled some of Samus’ abilities—both new and ones previously seen in other games in the series.
- Flash Shift – This all-new Aeion Ability lets Samus travel a set distance – forward or backward, while on the ground or in the air – in an instant.
- Pulse Radar –This handy Aeion Ability allows Samus to scan her immediate surroundings and pinpoint breakable blocks.
- Grapple Beam – A rope-like beam that can connect to specific points, the Grapple Beam allows Samus to swing across gaps or manipulate parts of her environment, such as pulling an object.
- Ice Missile – By using this cool upgrade, Samus can freeze enemies to easily destroy them or even use some of them as platforms!
- Storm Missile – With the Storm Missiles, Samus can lock on to and fire multiple small missiles in succession.
- Cross Bomb – This powerful bomb explodes in four directions.
- Speed Booster – This ability allows her to run at great speed, dealing damage to enemies and smashing through certain walls.
- Shinespark – True Metroid experts know all about this electrifying move, which can be activated to have Samus fly in a set direction while in her Speed Booster state.
- Screw Attack – A classic move that has been in every single 2D Metroid game, the Screw Attack finds Samus damaging enemies and shattering certain obstacles during a spin jump.
In addition to all these abilities, the trailer also highlighted some new sequences from the game, including several featuring giant creatures, terrifying robots and new environments.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Great things come in small packages ;)
Mario odyssey is 5.7GB. Botw is 14.4 GB. Their compression is amazing.
Idk if Nintendo just has advanced compression technology or what because even Breath of the Wild was absurdly small for how big the world was
They are historically absolute wizards at compressing their assets. Especially audio. Though, it also helps that their assets don't need to be that high quality for what they achieve.
For example, most "AAA" games these days have quite a few maps even for a single mesh/model. And some have less. Let's take Breath of the Wild for example. A Sword model might just have albedo/color, normal, world space normal, and specularity maps each at 512px by 512px. Let's say each of those maps are only 100KB in size. That's only 400KB for the Sword Model.
While a Sword in something like Eldin Ring, might have several more types of maps (Metalicity/Metalness, Ambient Occlusion, Cavity, Emission, Displacement, etc.) maps that would be 2048pxx2048px at least to make sure when rendered at higher resolutions, things don't get muddy even when up close.
So say that's like 8-9 2K Maps for 1 sword. Each map is 2MB in size (And that's a lowball estimate), that's 16MB of just map data for 1 sword uncompressed. And that's for thousands of assets so you can see how that file size could build up quickly.
Then you also get into polycounts where some modern games can have hundreds of thousands or millions of polygons per model, vs. Nintendo games where Link in BOTW is probably no more than 50K polys if that.
A lot of modern games also just don't compress their audio for one reason or another. Artistic choice or just no desire to do so.
Gee, people really hate this discussion topic.
lol, that's fine. I guess some people took the analysis as an insult rather than well...an analysis.
It's not the size of the world that matters for file size it's unique assets. Think about it there's stables dotted around that are all identical, not that many enemy mods, textures are lower res (which for the art style is fine) and side characters aren't voice acted. BOTW file size makes perfect sense to be a lot lower than something like Witcher 3 which has far more voice acting, textures and unique models. BOTW is a large play area made out of relatively few bricks.
Does size really matters ? Very old classic valid question.
