Here's Why Kingdom Come: Deliverance's Day One Patch Is So Large

For potential Kingdom Come: Deliveranceplayers who saw the size of the game's massive day one patch and balked at how long it might take to download it, the game's publishers have stepped in to clear the air before any rumors start circulating.

Coming in at just around 23 GB, the day one update is the size of some entire games. It offers improvements like the rebalancing of money, experience, weapon, and armor stats, all of which sound like they'd be pretty sizeable which makes the huge update seem more realistic. Still, some players had questions about why the update was as large as it was, questions that Deep Silver's PR team addressed in a ResetEra post, specifically some half-joking suggestions that this update was actually for downloading the game, not various fixes and rebalances.

Will Powers, the senior manager for marketing and PR at publisher Deep Silver, first started by quoting a statement from Martin Klima, executive producer at developer Warhorse Studios.

"Four years after our Kickstarter campaign, our game is set to be released tomorrow. The task was really big and our team although still quite small and we always wanted to deliver, to create the game we wanted and we believed you wanted. Before talking about some background, all of us at Warhorse would like to thank our community, the backers and friends who helped us to bring this dream to life by giving us the chance to develop what we believe is a unique RPG experience!

"The production realities of game development mean that a 'release' version has to be finalized some time before the actual release date. We could have used this time to get some rest, or we could use it to create some additional content and sell it to you as DLC, but we went back to the version-to-be-released and worked on it. The results are obvious: quests are more balanced, RPG progression is smoother, the game runs faster and every facet of the game got more polish. The drawback of course is that most of the data in the old build was replaced and has to be downloaded as a patch. At a hefty size, it's going to take some time to download and it's a shame. Still, we strongly believe that after four years wait it will pay off to wait a little bit longer while the Day 1 patch is downloading. Trust me, it will deliver the awesome experience YOU deserve."

Powers afterwards explained some details about the game's engine and how small changes can quickly add up, thus resulting in the size of the day one patch.

"So, let me stop the rumor mill dead in its tracks before everyone continues jumping to conclusions," Powers said. "The way that I've been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives. If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the ENTIRE 2GB portion. That beings said, this is a major patch that improves overarching mechanics throughout the game, so it touches almost all of these 2GB archives in the entire game build. Essentially you are having to redownload the game to replace the existing files. It shouldn't stack them and inflate on your harddrive, but rather replace the previously downloaded build files."

The day one patch may still take some players a while to download regardless of what's included, but it'll be available when Kingdom Come: Deliverance releases on Feb. 13.