The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomrecently showed off its second official trailer viaNintendo’s February 8Direct, and following an update on its store page, Nintendo revealed the game’s digital file size to be 18.2 GB. Though in the larger overall gaming industry, 18 gigs is actually quite asmallgame size-wise, Nintendo and itsSwitchhave been known to work on a different scale.
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The standard Switch model only comes with a measly 32 GB of storage space, a good portion of which is already taken up by its preloaded OS data, meaning that, unless players spring for a separate SD, they only have about 25 GB of space available to use. Therefore, Switch titles have to be smaller to account for this, which is usually not a problem in the first-party capacity, as Nintendo-developed games are often much less graphically intensive than most modern AAA games.
Tears of the Kingdom, however, goes further than any Nintendo-developed Switch game has before. As noted by the keen eyes over atIGN, this is the biggest first-party exclusive on the Switch by quite a significant amount. A handful of games come relatively close. The recentFire Emblem Engagereached 12.60 GB, while last year’sXenoblade Chronicles 3clocked in at 14.38 GB.
Tipping only slightly ahead of that is 2017’sBreath of the Wild, the predecessor to Tears of the Kingdom, which previously held the record for biggest first-party Switch game at 14.40 GB. Though the difference is not overwhelming, it’s significant enough to wonder what is making Tears of The Kingdom that much bigger than the original game.
As has been known for a while now, Tears of the Kingdom will take place in the same world as Breath of the Wild, but will also have additional floating structures in the sky, which Link can seemingly traverse. On top of that, the game’s most recent trailer, as seen above, showed off numerous new enemies, weapons, and even vehicles, all of which will take up their due space. A small increase in graphical fidelity could also be to blame for the larger size.
