"Our tech wizards have been hard at work forging solutions."

Image credit: Eurogamer

In a world afflicted with ever-increasing storage and RAM costs, it's nice to see a game make a serious effort to reduce its footprint on your SSD. Cue Marvel Rivals. On PS5 and Xbox, you will see an install-size reduction of roughly 15GB - down from 73GB - whilst the PC version reduces by a whopping 40GB. This means we're getting a reduction of roughly 20 percent on consoles, whereas on PC the file size will shrink by over 57 percent.

"In season 9.5, we are implementing a massive texture compression overhaul," said creative director Guangyun Chen in a video detailing changes coming to the game in the latest update. "Without sacrificing a single pixel of visual fidelity, we are drastically shrinking the game's footprint on your hard drives."

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There is one slight downside, however: you will need to re-download the whole package again in order to play when the update is pushed out. "Note: 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," explained Chen. The update is expected to go live on 7th August.

Marvel Rivals has been going from strength-to-strength since it launched at the end of 2024: it is still one of the top-played games on Xbox and PlayStation, and has a steady stream of content in the works to tie-in with the biggest releases in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it's not all been smooth sailing: the latest big update to the game introduced UI changes that have left players frustrated and disappointed, knocking the overall score of the game on Steam down to 'mixed'. The developer has been pretty good at listening to player feedback, though, so there is hope in the community that this issue will be addressed soon.

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