Home Gaming Warframe is shrinking its install size with “The Great Ensmallening”

Warframe is shrinking its install size with “The Great Ensmallening”

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It’s been nearly two years since I last hopped into Warframe. In that time, developer Digital Extremes has dropped a ton of content into its oddball free-to-play sci-fi looter shooter. There are new frames, new open-world environments, new quests, and a whole new spaceflight simulator game mode. While not costing gamers a cent to access, all that additional content has come with a price: storage. While not yet anywhere close to the utterly ridiculous SSD-destroying antics of Call of Duty – which is now over 220 GB on PC – the install size of Warframe has balooned noticeably. And DE are doing something about it.

Hilariously dubbed “The Great Ensmallening” in a new blog post, a series of three upcoming updates will use a texture compression technology called Oodle Texture to reduce storage requirements. As explained, this tech will roughly half the size of some visual assets on disk, with negligible image quality loss as a trade-off. You can check out a Before and After pic below, and besides for some sliiiiiightly different shadow placements, if you can easily spot a big difference between the two then you officially have superpowered eyes.

Before:

After:

The first part of this plan will be a 6.5GB update, but paradoxically once its installed, it will reduce Warframe’s overall install size by 6.6GB. With another two updates to follow, the plan is to eventually reduce the installation by a total of 15GB. Yes, that’s not the world’s biggest saving but when COD is busy gobbling up every gigabyte it sees, then every bit counts. Good guy DE strikes again!

On top of reducing file sizes, these new updates – or “mini-remasters”, as DE calls them – will also “make quality and performance optimizations to formats we have haven’t touched since we launched”. The end result will be a smaller, quicker loading game without sacrificing any visuals. Cool.

Last Updated: September 11, 2020

9 Comments

  1. This is great news, but I’m still hoping for the day that they announce crossave.

    I would love to take my progress with me across platforms, especially for when you want to play Warframe with friends on other platforms. For a game that surpassed Destiny years ago, it’s the one feature from Destiny that Warframe sorely needs.

    Last night, I finally unlocked one of the Grineer personal bosses, a kuva lich, and the guy is hilarious. I might spare his life when I finally work out which combination of runes can kill him.

    Reply

  2. konfab

    September 11, 2020 at 10:33

    What annoys me is we live in the era where these games are connected to the Internet. Which means that it wouldn’t be difficult to have the game only download the textures it needs.

    So if you want to run the game at 8k, the game will download the 100GB or so textures it needs. If you are a 1080p (the p stands for peasant), then you can simply make do with 2GB of normal textures.

    They can do the same thing for cinematics as well.

    Reply

    • konfab

      September 11, 2020 at 10:33

      And honestly, if I can bother spending a few hours getting our web app to be below 500kb by doing this type of thing, then I am sure a multi-million dollar company can do the same to shave off a few gb.

      Reply

    • konfab

      September 11, 2020 at 10:33

      And honestly, if I can bother spending a few hours getting our web app to be below 500kb by doing this type of thing, then I am sure a multi-million dollar company can do the same to shave off a few gb.

      Reply

  3. Alien Emperor Trevor

    September 11, 2020 at 10:46

    I tested this feature about a year ago, worked great. My install size is now 0gb.

    Reply

  4. Caveshen Rajman

    September 11, 2020 at 13:02

    This is excellent. Not many dev houses would do something this insane and brave lol.

    Reply

  5. Son of Banana Jim

    September 11, 2020 at 13:45

    This is great news, but I’m still hoping for the day that they announce crossave.

    I would love to take my progress with me across platforms, especially for when you want to play Warframe with friends on other platforms. For a game that surpassed Destiny years ago, it’s the one feature from Destiny that Warframe sorely needs.

    Last night, I finally unlocked one of the Grineer personal bosses, a kuva lich, and the guy is hilarious. I might spare his life when I finally work out which combination of runes can kill him.

    Reply

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