If you’re still running a small-scale solid state drive for gaming, you may want to consider an upgrade if you’re planning on playing Forza Motorsport 7. The upcoming simulation racer has a slated install size of 100GB and will only get bigger from there as new free and paid-for DLC content is added.
Games have been steadily increasing in digital size since their inception, and what once was contained in a few kilobytes of code, now requires gigabytes upon gigabytes of storage space. The big jump in recent years has come from increased texture sizes thanks to the added memory and storage space of modern consoles and that is only set to continue now we move toward 4K resolution with systems like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
Forza Motorsport 7 however takes it to a whole new level, almost doubling the install size of the previous game in the series. As MSPowerUser points out, unless some other game comes along before its release, the upcoming Forza will be the biggest Xbox One game ever at launch. Although Finder does highlight that Gears of War 4 with its patches and updates closes in on 117GB and Halo 5: Guardians isn’t far off reaching 100GB itself.
Of course such a large install size doesn’t just mean that you’ll need to designate a good chunk of your storage drive to play it, but you’ll likely have to sit through a big download, too. Even if you’re running a 100Mbps fiber connection, you’ll be looking at waiting for more than two hours to see it completed — with a connection like that, you probably haven’t waited that long for anything in some time.
If all of this talk of long downloads and hardware upgrades has you mulling over whether you actually want to buy and play Forza Motorsport 7, consider that it plays very well. In our hands-on testing at E3 2017, we thought it was fantastic, with great physics and amazing visuals.
