If you've caught yourself sweating a little as each successive Gears of War 4 update has slowly consumed your hard drive, some help is here. The Coalition has revealed the that new Rise of the Horde update, which began rolling out today, reduces the overall size of the game by a significant amount, thanks to a new compression technique.
Though the full space taken up by Gears of War 4 on your hard drive will ultimately be lower after the update, the update itself is a bit on the large size. From The Coalition:
We've heard your feedback on the Hard Drive footprint of Gears of War 4 being quite substantial. Over the past few months, we've been working on a new compression technique to dramatically reduce the overall file size of Gears of War 4 and to provide smaller sized downloads for future Updates. In order to reduce our file size for all the Updates since release, you'll be downloading all our Updates again as one larger Update with Rise of the Horde - but the end result will be a much smaller overall game size than before.
The update itself comes in at just under 25GB on Xbox One and 29GB on Windows 10. After updating, however, the total size of the game should be around 78GB on Xbox One and 93GB on Windows 10. Those are still some hefty figures, but that's much slimmer than the 130GB that Gears was approaching on Windows 10 prior to this update.
As for Rise of the Horde itself, there's a whole lot of new stuff to check out, including some new difficulty tiers, class skills, and more. Check out our prior look at the update for more.
