Hi Blizz,
Long-time player here… Are there any plans to shrink the game size of World of Warcraft?
A friend who recently bought a new laptop downloaded the game onto it and told me that the game size was nearly 100GB of space!?! I find this a bit insane, considering the game engine, graphics, content etc. I vaguely recall that there was a shrink-down of the game file size in or around MoP-WoD days because many realized it became cumbersome. With the shrink-down came with it notable bug fixes and the game seemed to run smoothly for a while. My guess… though I don’t know for sure is that maybe some of the old code had been re-written/updated. Can we expect a code clean-up anytime soon?? The amount of bugs in each patch is getting really out of hand. Or can we expect a file size reduction soon?
As with the previous file size reduction, there was the removal of older content, which in all honestly I think most would be fine with. With the new catch-up system for alts, there is little to no way a single character can go through all of that content before being max level. There are some things I wouldn’t want to see gone though… I love my garrison… don’t take that away from me.
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Go ask Bungie how their “Destiny Content Vault” was recieved by the player base.
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The game is almost 20 years old. One hundred gigs for a 20 year old game is pretty good considering most modern games start at 100+ gigs before patches and updates.
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While that is true… They also operate on modern game engines, with better graphics, capabilities, interaction, etc. World of Warcraft is… Dreamcast-level or PlayStation 2-level at this point. I don’t think I would be okay with a PlayStation 2 game being 100GB… It just wouldn’t be feasible or manageable, which may be why it appears that Blizzard has a hard time pinning down all the recent bugs since the launch of Dragonflight.
Example: New World at its launch was 50 GB. It was a stunning open-world MMO with fluid gameplay and amazing capabilities. AND it also had player housing 
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I think you need to go hook up a PS2 if you think WoW looks like a PS2 game. You’ve forgotten what those games look like.
Removing old content is an absolute “no” from me. I play that content on alts a lot; I like changing up my leveling experience.
Currently have alts in Un’Goro Crater and Dragonblight, played in the last couple of days.
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Imagine thinking 100gb for a 20y old MMO is too much 
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My WoW folder, complete with addons is 117GB. SWTOR is 53.7GB. D4 is 77.8GB. GW2 is 50.7GB. Palia is 28.9GB. Rift is 23.8GB.
Hmm… I guess I never thought about that until now. 
Some of those other MMOs are over 10 years now and still half the space. And my addons are only 398mb.
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i play on a macbook and my system runs out of memory if i have anything else open aside from maybe spotify
sometimes the game just starts eating gigs (usually runs at 8 but can spike to 12) in which case i have to restart the game
i know macbook is probably the worst fathomable set up but im going to play wow laying in my bed on my free laptop and you cant stop me
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I wasn’t saying it looks like a PS 2 game… I’m saying it in age comparison but I guess I should’ve made that more clear. The technology is quite old. Kind of how I viewed Atari when I had a PlayStation. Older games shouldn’t be so cumbersome.
It is harder to manage large game files… especially when you write new code on top of old code. There’s so much old code in this game… something is bound to break anytime there is new content. What I want to see is some code rewrite/game content reduction so that we don’t have to keep posting about numerous bugs in old content every time small patches come out.
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Rewriting the code would be a massive undertaking and likely lead to even worse bugs in the long run.
The code also really doesnt gave much to do with the size of the game, its the textures
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Audio can also be a huge culprit. With the amount of incidental/quest/WQ lines that are voiced, I wouldn’t be surprised if voiceovers alone make up at least 1 gigabyte of each expansion now. And that’s not even factoring all the zone/raid music with all the variations they do, etc.
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I’m pretty sure they’ve done it before when they did the file squish previously. It would be coming from a family of software developers. I get it, BUT sometimes when there’s just too much going on… you spend more time fixing bugs than the time it would’ve taken to rewrite the code to make the software run more smoothly. Take a small team of people and start the process. Do I think it needs to come before the next Expansion? Pfft no. That won’t happen, but starting the work is half the battle.
It needs to be done IMO at this point. I can’t help sitting back while people tell me about all the bugs they had to fix because of a software update and how much it takes from the current project. It pushes the project back weeks in some cases. Then they tell me about how if they just had a small team to clean up the code then these issues wouldn’t happen in the future. I’ve heard it a lot. But most companies won’t invest the time for it because they think it’ll be a waste of resources. When you start thinking that way, your business falls by the wayside. I’ve seen contracts lost because companies fail to invest time and funds to innovate or fix issues permanently.
They didnt redo the code, they redid the databases and made them more efficient
Yea, audio and textures, code is small
That surprises me greatly considering the talent at Blizzard. I would think that at some point it would be high time to update the code in sections. Family members do it all the time so I can’t see why a large company like Blizzard wouldnt.
And I feel you have a pessimistic view of rewriting code. In most cases, when code is updated it actually makes it easier on the developers and the customer in the long run. There may be a few hiccups to overcome but generally, it saves time and money in the future.
Only way that will happen if you opt out of entire worlds.
Example: don’t want to play SL, SL maps and related are removed.
Because so many people have come and gone that a lot of the code they probably dont even know how it works anymore, thr original code was written so haphazardly and without comments that only the people who wrote it knows what it does and what it connects too.
Happens all the time on long running games
I generally disagree. The old coders were the kings in their day. They understood the program inside and out. When new code comes along that’s when new developers think that the old code wasn’t written well. It was written years ago with standards that we don’t use today. A lack of understanding is usually the culprit.
You know blizzard keeps saying they have expansions planned for a long time. But I don’t know how much more cluttered wow can get before everyone experiences to much lag to actually play the game, and that’s assuming you can still download the game due to space.
I think they will need to either shrink things drastically or create a wow 2. Maybe after the world soul saga or something. I don’t know how much longer the game can go on with the assets it has.
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