Assassin's Creed Shadows file size is the second-biggest in the series, beaten only by Valhalla and dwarfing Mirage

The file size for Assassin's Creed Shadows has been revealed, and it's a biggun, so make sure you clear some room on your hard drive ahead of its March 20 launch date.

A ResetEra user posted a picture of their Xbox pre-download of Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it clocks in at a whopping 109.36GB. For comparison, Elden Ring is only about 45GB on Xbox, less than half the size of Shadows.

"Damn! A lot larger than I thought," replies one commenter. The previous mainline entry in the series, Assassin's Creed Mirage, only needs 40GB, just a third of what Shadows is demanding. It did seem a lot smaller in scope and scale, but still, that's an absurd increase. Valhalla, arguably the biggest game in the series, requires 160GB of storage space according to its Steam system requirements, so that should help you know what to expect from Shadows.

The ResetEra post also tells us that the preload for Assassin's Creed Shadows is now live on Xbox. The PS5 preload isn't live yet, but if Monster Hunter Wilds was anything to go by, it'll be two days before release, so March 18.

At over 100GB, Assassin's Creed Shadows will take up at least 10% of the space on even the biggest stock Xbox or PS5 hard drive. Luckily there are plenty of speedy PS5 SSDs and even 16TB Xbox SSDs you can get.

I remember when a 16MB PS2 memory card seemed like more storage than I could ever need – how young and naive I was. These days, many triple-A games are well over 100GB which means we're all having to constantly delete and redownload our favorites. I should bite the bullet and just get a proper external hard drive myself, but I am simply useless with technology.

While you're here, check out all the upcoming video game release dates so you know what else to save some space on your SSD for.