If this holds true, it means Xenoblade Chronicles 3 will be the largest Switch exclusive yet. Pokemon Sword and Shield was 10.3 GB, meanwhile The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild had a 13.4 GB base game. Those with the regular Nintendo Switch or Switch Lite consoles will find the game eating up about 47 percent of their built-in storage, while OLED owners will only lose about 23 percent of their storage space. But the size of the upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles sequel shouldn’t be a surprise.
RELATED: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Combat Detailed
The Case for Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s File Size
The main reason why Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s file size makes sense is because gamers have seen this happen before. Larger sequels aren’t an unusual phenomenon; for example, the first game in CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series was 15 GB, followed by The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings at 25 GB, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at 35 GB. Even so, the game with the largest size available on the Nintendo eShop is NBA 2K21 at nearly 40 GB, following up on NBA 2K20 eating up almost 33 GB of space.
To compare, the file size for Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is 13.7 GB, meanwhile Xenoblade Chronicles 2 takes up 13.2 GB of space on Switch. Although it may look like the games drop in size as the series goes along, it should be noted that the original Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii U was about 6.5 GB - making the sequel, more than twice the size of its predecessor. For this reason, it’s only logical that the third game to the series is bigger than the games prior.
The 15 GB file size for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 should be a surprise for the opposite reason, as it’s actually much smaller than a sequel is expected to be in many cases. Monolith Soft managed to create a sequel that’s only a couple of gigabytes larger than the second game when the latter was, again, a little over twice as big as the original Wii U game. As of this writing, precisely what improvements Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has over its predecessor is unknown.
Sequels are more often bigger than any previous game in their series because their stories get more complex, their worlds become larger, and the game’s graphics naturally become more detailed and sophisticated as the years go by. Alongside those progressions, studios tend to add new characters to their games’ sequels, like with Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s dual-protagonists Noah and Mio. In the case of this next Xenoblade game, it is said to combine elements from both its predecessors, which were largely disconnected.
All these details are reflected with the ever-increasing sizes of modern games, and why players will find that extra storage becomes more critical regardless of their platform. With that said, fans looking forward to the next installment of Xenoblade Chronicles should make sure they have enough space before the game’s surprise earlier release date. Thankfully, plenty of micro SD cards with massive storage sizes exist on the market to supplement the small internal storage of the Switch.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 releases July 29, 2022 for Nintendo Switch.
MORE: Xenoblade 3’s Earlier Release Date Hints at Something Big From Nintendo
