Files sizes of various launch window Nintendo Switch games!

[IkePoR]

Airaku said:

niceguygameplayer said:
Breath of the Wild is so small. How can this be a huge open world game? Also, some of the other games are as small as PS1 games. Quite disappointed.

                                

I still don't understand how Nintendo compresses their games so well. I have some theories but their file sizes are always beyond small, other developers struggle to compress the way they do. It's almost magical. In case for Breath of the Wild, the art style allows you to use the lowest possible size of textures. It's absolutely crazy, did you know that Wind Waker HD is only 2.6 GB? Where Twilight Princess HD is 4.51 GB? Those are both decent size games in terms of length but the textures of Twilight Princess and minus the empty spaces make it much larger. Bethesda is also quite decent at compressing as well imho. They aren't as efficient as Nintendo, but they are within the realms of believability and attainability. I think Nintendo uses a lot of tricks in terms of known the own hardware that they created to offset some tricks. I mean Pikmin 3 looks beautiful in terms of graphics and textures and the game is only 3.85 GB. There are demos with much larger file sizes than that and look considerably worse graphically and in terms of textures. Textures are a huge factor in file size. This is why the HD era saw such a massive jump in file sizes.

tl;dr: Breath of the Wild is HUGE with it's massive 13.5 GB size in terms of Nintendo file sizes. They are very efficient when they compress their games and this is their biggest game to date by a long shot.

Sound quality often takes the biggest hits.  I've been playing Fire Emblem Fates recently and noticed it has far worse sound than Awakening, guessing due to all three games being much larger than Awakening.