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Halo: The Master Chief Collection creators 343 Industries have explained the reasoning behind its planned 20GB day one patch for the game.
Eurogamer spotted that Halo franchise development director Frank O’Connor told Neogaf that it’s purely to avoid the need to ship the game on two discs and require users to switch between them.
That’s not a patch. It’s content,” he said. The game is designed to run as a single, unified product, digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs.
Since the bulk of it is MP or MP related, the logic is sound. There will also be a TU [title update] in there, but that in itself is a tiny fraction of the content. We realize that this isn’t ideal for everyone, but it’s the path to the smoothest eventual experience.
All four campaigns will run directly from the disc without the content update. As will some custom game features.”
It’s not clear why the game couldn’t install one disc and then use a second for gameplay.
O’Connor added that while a two-disc release wasn’t practical for this product” it could be a method implemented in future release on the platform.
Do I understand the inconvenience and annoyance for some users? Of course. I’m not going to blow smoke or ignore it,” he said. For some folks it will be straight up annoying and I both apologize unreservedly for the irritance, and hope that the package and the way it works more than makes up for it.
I also get that 20 gigs is a fair old chunk of bits and it is not ideal. Most players will have a smooth and happy experience. The game will launch (including digital version) before installation is complete, so there is plenty of content to play around in while the red installs.”
