Warframe's shrinking its install size by "at least" 15GB

If your hard drive is groaning under the weight of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, then at least Digital Extremes is helping lighten the load - as Warframe is getting some updates to reduce its file size.

Through three "mini-remaster" updates spread over the rest of 2020, Digital Extremes intends to free up at least 15GB of space. The first update rolls out next week on PC and frees up 6.6GB, but Digital Extremes said that most platforms will "see similar improvements".

The updates will change how Warframe's texture data is compressed, using technology called Oodle Texture to roughly halve the size of textures on disk with "negligible" visual differences. The first update will target Warframe's lightmaps, while the second will apply the technology to the rest of the textures in the game.

"My memory is hazy about those early days back in 2012 when we launched our Closed Beta but I distinctly remember the entire download being small enough to fit on a CD-ROM," said Digital Extremes developer Glen Miner. "In the eight years since launch we've seen the install image grow over 100 times in size and when you consider all the amazing content that was added over the years it's easy to see why...

"There's so much content in Warframe now that some people can't fit it on their smaller SSDs and have to run it off of a slow HDD instead. There's so many things in the game that even for people with large NVME SSDs the game can't always load everything as fast as we'd like."

While downloading all the mini-remasters might be a hassle in the short term, it's probably worth it to free up that precious space, particularly if you're running Warframe on a SSD. The mini updates are also being used to make quality and performance optimisations to formats Digital Extremes hasn't touched since launch, so it was probably about time for a spring clean anyway.