‘Diablo III’ PS4 Will Gobble Up European Bandwidth With 60GB Download, Find Out Why
Large game downloads for this new era of the PS4 and Xbox One are nothing new. However, the download size for Diablo III: Reaper of Souls — Ultimate Evil Edition in the European Playstation Store may have just taken the cake, and most of your data cap along with it.
The web version of the PS Store for Great Britain lists Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition as a 58.2 GB download for the PS4. It’s the same for other countries in Europe, though screenshots captured by a NeoGAF user show that the game is actually listed as a 62.7 GB download when accessing the Playstation Store on the console.
The same can’t be said for the North American PS Store. Both the Canadian and United States stores list the game at 26.1 GB and the Mexico store is 20.4 GB.
Meanwhile, there is no Diablo III: Reaper of Souls listing on the Xbox Store for the Xbox One yet to compare. This is due to Microsoft not implementing the ability to pre-order games from its online store yet.
So why the huge file size difference between Europe and North America? The culprit appears to be the audio files to support all the different languages in the region. The EU release will support at least nine, possibly ten different packs.
When I attempted to install the PC version of Diablo III to my PC with nine language packs installed, the file size was just under 57 GB. When I bumped that up to ten languages, it increased to 61.9 GB.
Additionally, EU PS Blog commenter bsolar17 pointed the following after pre-ordering the game.
“I have the store set to Italian and I noticed that there are different packages added to the Auto-Download queue after the pre-order. One seems to be the main game:
~20.5GB: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition
There is also an additional very large package:
~37.8GB: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition (Italian).
Both are described as ‘game.’
I guess that the second, very large package contains the European Localization: I talked with a Blizzard representative and he stated the console version comes with all European languages available.”
That raises the question of why Blizzard Entertainment and Sony created an install package for Diablo III in Europe that is approximately 10 GB greater than the size of a Blu-ray disk. This is even more baffling when you consider the prevalence of bandwidth caps. Why isn’t there an option to select the language or languages you want installed based on your preference?
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls — Ultimate Evil Edition will be released on August 19 to the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. Blizzard just confirmed that the Xbox One version of the game will run in 1080p and 60 frames per second and detailed how to transfer characters from the first Diablo III release last year to this new version that includes the Reaper of Souls expansion.
Are you planning on picking up Diablo III for the Playstation 4 in Europe? Does this news change your mind about purchasing digital or physical? Let us know in the comments below.
[Image via Battle.net]
