Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES
DECEPTIVELY SMALL
How HITMAN 3’s developers cut the trilogy’s install size in half
Just look at this place. No wonder Hitman 2 was so big!
Hitman 3 is 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 Hitman 3 will actually shrink instead of grow, retroactively optimising the first two Hitman games into a dramatically smaller package. How did IO Interactive manage to halve the install size? We asked the developer to break down the technology and techniques it used to cut 80 gigabytes out of the trilogy.
“With all content installed, including the locations from Hitman 1 and Hitman 2, 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 says.