Modern games, such as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, are increasingly demanding of your available storage. But in this case, at least, Square Enix has made use of a tool that should be used by more developers to make Steam Deck downloads take up less space.
As reported by GamingOnLinux, the latest update to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth significantly reduces the size of the download when installing it to your favorite handheld.
On Steam Deck it now comes in at just over 88GB, which is still a lot, but substantially less than the over 144GB download on a desktop gaming PC. Thanks, Square Enix, from Steam Deck owners everywhere.
So how is this possible just for Steam Deck? Admittedly, this passed me by, but as GamingOnLinux goes on to explain, developers can actually target Steam Deck specifically when adding their packages to Steam.
By setting up a dedicated content depot for Steam Deck, overall package sizes can be reduced by offering such things as lower resolution textures. After all, we're not hunting for 4K visuals and ray tracing on the Deck, are we?
This isn't a totally foreign concept, either. Borderlands 2 always springs to mind, offering an HD texture pack as an additional download for those who wanted it and had the hardware to use it.
The Steam Deck is powerful, but not that powerful, and we can't use these super shiny high-res texture packs anyway, so it makes sense to offer specific versions without them. The sad truth is that not many do this, but they definitely should.
Square Enix gets a gold star for effort here, and is setting an example others should certainly follow. The update you're looking for is version 1.003, so grab it and reclaim some of your precious storage.
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