Incredible news, folks: Marvel Rivals has completely repackaged its assets. No, not those assets. Last Friday, the internet’s most erogenous shooter announced that it was slimming down. As part of an “Optimized texture resource compression strategy across all platforms,” Marvel Rivals now comes in about 40 GB lighter on PC than it did before.
This is part of the game’s bevy of season 9.5 tweaks and updates. In a chat with a stationary camera, Marvel Rivals creative director Guangyun Chen said that “our tech wizards have been hard at work forging solutions. In season 9.5, we are implementing a massive texture compression overhaul, without sacrificing a single pixel of visual fidelity.”
The downside is that, because NetEase is rejigging everything, the actual season 9.5 update itself is meatier than usual. “The initial season 9.5 update will be larger than usual, but the final install size will be much lighter,” says Chen.
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It’s always nice when this happens. Last year, Helldivers 2 pulled a similar trick, chopping itself down from “~154GB to ~23GB”. How? Magic. Plus, the devs at Arrowhead went and de-duped a load of data across the game’s installed files.
Previously, all sorts of things were in there numerous times to make them easier for people’s rusty spinning hard drives, but the devs found a way around it. NetEase hasn’t said if it’s pulled a similar trick—but I’m in favour of anything that frees up space on my SSD in our current computer-price hellscape.
As an outside observer, I get the impression people are relatively happy with Marvel Rivals’ direction. Though, again, I might be mixing up the general sentiment with the specific sentiment people have about Captain America’s speedos. For a more expert take, I recommend you check out our Elie Gould on why Marvel Rivals needs to pick a lane.