One of the cooler aspects of Hitman 3 is that players who own IO Interactive’s previous installments will be able to go back and enjoy remastered versions of all of the older levels with gameplay tweaks and updated visuals enabled by the latest rendition of the Glacier engine.
With Hitman 2 already weighing in at a meaty 149 GB when coupled with Hitman 1’s Legacy Pack, some of you may have been worrying how outrageously big the latest installment might get, but an IO Interactive developer has revealed that this will be less of a concern. The studio has figured out how to reduce Hitman 3 to around 100 GB of storage, which is all thanks to new compression and data management techniques.
“One thing I think all of you will be happy to hear is that we have managed to get the size of the game down significantly,” Path Finder noted in a thread (via Twisted Voxel) discussing the first five minutes of Hitman 3’s opening Dubai mission. “All three games with all content will take up around 100 gb.”
“Biggest wins are because of data management and file structures and how we deliver the game so we could remove duplicate data. We also use newer and better compression for textures – that helps too.”
The developer also confirmed that all of the older levels would be updated with Hitman 3’s new screen space reflections, which should be a significant improvement over the previous installments’ render-to-texture reflections.
“It’s backwards compatible with the previous two games in the trilogy and lots of surfaces has been upgraded,” he said. “It’s pretty stunning I gotta say! […] As an example, the Paris fashion show catwalk floor is now fully reflecting the models and the rest of the room, making the whole scenario look way more impressive.”