In a recent Famitsu interview with Bandai Namco Entertainment, one of the biggest challenges they helped to tackle in the development of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was discussed.
60 GB?!
During development, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had a file size of 60GB, which is pretty huge for a Nintendo Switch title.
In order to keep the file size low, Bandai Namco used many compression technologies. For example, they used the “opus” file format for music files and using “ZStandard” instead of “LZ4” and “Zlip” for compressing files.
Also taken into consideration was the loading times, so the compression had to be set to level 9 instead of the maximum level.
The next step was to remove duplicated data. For example, there are many types of Mario in the game, and their hats are all different. In order to reduce duplicated data, Bandai Namco had to create a “base hat” for Mario first, and then all the peculiar aspects of different hats were built on top of the base as layers.
Thanks to these methods, Bandai Namco successfully reduced the game’s file size to 15GB, a whopping 75% reduction in size.
Quite impressive to say the least right?
