File size is a real bugbear when it comes to live-service games, because they consistently balloon as updates and features stack. NetEase is working on remedying how much Marvel Rivals takes up on your hard drive, knocking 40GB off on PC in the latest update.
This will come as part of the Season 9.5 patch, coming on August 7. The mid-season sweep will give all the textures and visuals a lick of paint, and chop the install size down in the process, not just on PC but consoles too.
Sadly, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players aren't getting quite the same improvement. On consoles, Marvel Rivals is only going down by 15GB. That's the price you pay for convenience, I suppose!
"As the Marvel Rivals universe expands with every season, so does our file size," Guangguang, the creative director of Marvel Rivals, says in the latest dev diary. "While this is the nature of a growing Chronoverse, our tech wizards have been hard at work forging solutions."
He explains that the "texture compression" is a significant contributor to being able to shrink the space the free multiplayer game takes up, and he warns that it mightn't feel like a decrease at first due to how big the update itself is. "Because we are completely repackaging these assets, the initial Season 9.5 update will be larger than usual, but the final install size will be much lighter," he adds.
This comes amid the latest addition to the roster, the gun-wielding The Hood, a New York City criminal and technological genius. Good thing NetEase is making the game more efficient, because he definitely wouldn't stand for such inconsistency.
