World of Warcraft is a huge MMORPG it also eats up a lot of space on your hard drive. Much more than the developers probably ever dreamed of.
World of Warcraft is considered one of the biggest, if not the biggest, MMORPG. This is not only due to the numerous continents that together make up the game world, but also to the sheer size of the data. What was an almost "cute" game of only 4 GB in comparison at the time has now grown many times over - and it doesn't stop there.
We take a look at how drastically WoW has grown over the years.
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Where does the data come from?
A few days ago, Reddit user factor3x compiled the sizes of the different game versions of World of Warcraft. The colleagues at Icy-Veins then created a graphic from this that illustrates the increase in the required hard disk space:
Where a simple HDD with 4 GB of free storage used to be sufficient, the demand has now grown significantly. Not only does it (so far) need a whopping 128 GB of free storage for the upcoming expansion "The War Within" - 32x as much as Vanilla - but an SSD hard drive is now also required. But that's probably not surprising, because with such data volumes, an ordinary hard drive would probably lead to loading times in the range of minutes.
Here's how WoW grew over the years:
World of Warcraft has had the biggest leap (relatively speaking) with the introduction of The Burning Crusade. Because there the game grew from 4 GB to 10 GB - significantly more than doubled. In absolute numbers, however, there were many expansions that weighed significantly more:
- Catclysm brought 10 GB of data.
- Battle for Azeroth brought a whopping 25 GB of data.
- Shadowlands added another 30 GB.
- Dragonflight, on the other hand, weighed "only" 20 GB.
You can find the exact numbers in this table:
What takes up so much space?
The biggest space eaters in games are usually not the files that are responsible for the actual world – but media. Especially videos, such as the high-resolution intro videos of an expansion, but also the cutscenes of the last few years take up a lot of space and ensure that World of Warcraft has been really bloated.
Of course, more and more voiced dialogues and better-resolution textures are also taking their place – but that makes relatively little difference compared to the videos (and the duration they are displayed in the game).
Why is The War Within so small?
Critical voices may now note that The War Within "only" brings 8 GB of new data with it. However, this is not an indication that the expansion will also be small in terms of content. This is because the cutscenes are still missing from the data, which usually take up a lot of space. In addition, the content of the future major patches, which will certainly be released in the course of The War Within, is still missing. With this, the entire story of World of Warcraft continues to grow.
So it can be assumed that The War Within will grow significantly above the 128 GB when the release is due.