Digital Extremes Is "Ensmallening" Your Warframe To Serve You Better

Don't freak out guys. Digital Extremes isn't taking content out of Warframe. Instead, they're remastering the game to make it easier for players to continue playing the ever-growing game without it gobbling up all of their hard drive space. Once completed, the project is supposed to free up 15GB of hard drive space. The catch is that since this is a remaster, it means fairly sizeable patches to make that happen. In fact, it appears that in each of the three stages, the space saved is approximately equal to the size of the download required to make that happen.

On September 9, Digital Extreme announced the project, noting that players would have 6.6 GB of space freed up -- after downloading a 6.5GB update. I know, it sounds a bit weird. But the overall gist is simply that they're taking a bigger collection of data and shrinking it by approximately half. They're doing this by changing things like how their texture data is compressed.

Today, the company announced the second part of this project -- which is intended to free up anywhere between eight and ten gigs after a 10GB download. This update is not only intended to reduce file size, but will actually improve the game's textures. (Apparently, the dev team decided that since they were there anyway, they might as well give everything a nice touch-up in the process.)

To give players an idea of what they'll be looking at this go-round, the team posted some handy before and after pictures in the update announcement. Part 2 will drop sometime next week. After that, players still have the third portion of this update before it's complete.