Gamers all over the world are receiving their copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake every day.
That’s because the game has shipped early to ensure that everyone has a chance to play it by its actual release date of April 10.
When you receive your copy, you might be chomping at the bit to start playing, but you’re still going to have to wait a bit. Like all modern games, Final Fantasy VII Remake is going to have to install on your PlayStation 4.
This installation might take a while.
The Installation size for Final Fantasy VII Remake is reported to be about 100 gigabytes. Considering that most PlayStation 4 consoles have a hard drive space of 500 gigabytes, that means it’s going to take up around 1/5 of your total hard drive space.
This puts Final Fantasy VII Remake on the same level size-wise as games like Red Dead Redemption 2.
Square Enix had previously warned players that the installation size on this game was going to be huge. That’s because they developed custom assets for every part of Midgar that you will visit throughout this adventure. That means no assets were reused from the original in the making of this game.
Complicating matters further, Sony has slowed download speeds on the PlayStation 4 recently in order to combat the strain that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is having on its online systems. That means not only will the game take considerable hard drive space, but it’s also going to take longer than normal to download.
Why would Sony do that?
They were trying to make sure that everyone was going to have online access during social distancing and quarantine. This is a period where more people than usual will be using the internet.
This is also why digital pre-orders received their pre-download of the game several days early. Typically, a game that has been pre-ordered digitally is downloaded onto your console about two days before it is released.
That’s because the developers want digital pre-orders to be playable at the stroke of midnight. For Final Fantasy VII Remake, the pre-download date was supposed to be April 8. However, Sony moved the date to April 3, which many gamers mistakenly believed meant that the digital release would be coming earlier than advertised.
Square Enix made sure to clarify that the digital release of the game was not coming out early, and that the early download date was the ensure that everyone had time to download this massive game before it releases on Friday.
