Kingdom Come: Deliverance's Day-One Patch Comes In At 23GB

Big day-one updates have become relatively commonplace over the past few years, but it's still notable to see one come in at the size of some games. To play medieval role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you'll have to download a colossal, 23GB day-one patch on PS4--but it includes a whole lot of performance, quest, and mechanics improvements.

Reports of the huge update surfaced recently on ResetEra, where players posted screenshots of their PS4 download screens with hours left before the patch finished downloading. To respond to complaints and frustration, Executive Producer Martin Kilma explained that developer Warhorse has made many improvements and additions since it had to submit a version of the game for certification. As a result, it needed a large first-day patch.

"The production realities of game development mean that a 'release' version has to be finalized some time before the actual release date," he wrote. "We could have used this time to get some rest, or we could use it to create some additional content and sell it to you as DLC, but we went back to the version-to-be-released and worked on it. The results are obvious: quests are more balanced, RPG progression is smoother, the game runs faster and every facet of the game got more polish."

Further, Will Powers from publisher Deep Silver explained that the patch isn't entirely composed of new data--in other words, you won't have 23GB on top of the size of the base game downloaded to your system.

"The way that I've been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives," Powers said. "If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the entire 2GB portion... Essentially you are having to redownload the game to replace the existing files. It shouldn't stack them and inflate on your harddrive, but rather replace the previously downloaded build files."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance launches tomorrow for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and you can check out its launch trailer at the top of this article. It's been in development for a long time: it was originally Kickstarted back in 2014, and you can read our 2014 preview of Kingdom Come here.

[News via Eurogamer]