Now that it’s November 8 in some time-zones, Death Stranding has officially begun rolling out. After three whole years of mystery and buildup, the latest from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is finally ready to intrigue and baffle fans with a story that could be anything from a metaphor for parenthood to a commentary on our current political climate. And while downloading the game shouldn’t be too much of a hassle, there is one little detail that storage-conscious players should be mindful of.
Last month, word on the street was that Death Stranding will require a 55 GB download on PS4. That’s fairly reasonable for a massive open-world game, and better yet, today GameSpot reports that once all’s said and done with installation and updating, the game only takes up 49 GB of hard drive space. However, that 49 GB doesn’t take into account the space players may have to make for the game’s auto-save feature.
It’s a common feature these days for games to automatically save after certain amounts of time, just in case something bad happens before players can save manually. But while most games only hold on to a few auto-saves at any one time, Death Stranding can apparently retain dozens of them.
The media outlet says that a number of its staff have found their save folders taking up close to 900 MB of space. That’s nearly a full gigabyte just for accommodating save files. By comparison, most PS4 games’ saves rarely surpass 100 MB, and none come close to what Death Stranding is capable of. And the thing is, this isn’t even a glitch, as Sony told GameSpot that the save system is working as intended.
In short, it doesn’t look like a problem Sony has any intention of fixing, which means players with low storage space are going to have to manage the game’s auto-saves themselves. On one hand, this should be easy enough to do, as they can always manually delete auto-saves in the system settings, which should bring Death Stranding’s save folder down to around 15 MB. On the other hand, that number is bound to grow fast as players play, and since Death Stranding is a pretty long game from the looks of it, they’re probably going have to do this a lot to keep things manageable.
Death Stranding is out on November 8 for PS4, followed by a PC release in Summer 2020.
Source: GameSpot