Compressing Hitman 3 will significantly reduce the install size of the entire trilogy

Intelligent development of IO Interactive

In a modern gaming world, the need for storage space is becoming more and more of a concern. With titles like Call of Duty and Rainbow Six Siege raking in triple digits of GB space – and the new PS5 and Xbox Series X platforms already sweating for breath – any title that can save its file size is worth calls out.

With its World of Assassination arc underway, IO Interactive's Hitman is already beginning to gobble up its players' hard drives and SSDs. Indeed, a full install of Hitman and Hitman 2 already takes up 150GB, and with a third title on the horizon, silent assassins everywhere are busy revamping their libraries to find space for the continued adventures of the game. officer 47.

However, speaking with PC Gamer, IO Interactive explained how Hitman 3 will not only be smaller than its predecessors, but surprisingly it will actually reduce the combined file size of the entire trilogy. IO estimates that the PC edition of Hitman, Hitman 2, and Hitman 3 will cost around 70-80 GB, once all three games are installed. An incredible and very welcome achievement in modern gaming.

The key to this space-saving marvel is Hitman's "LZ4 Compression" technology, which essentially micro-combines all repeat instances to the minimum required.

“The super-simplified description of LZ4 is that it replaces those long sequences with a reference to a sequence that previously appeared in the decompressed stream,” says IO CTO Maurizio De Pascale. “So, for example, instead of storing the word 'compression' as it is, the algorithm can store the equivalent of 'word appeared X words ago', which can be very efficiently encoded with a few bits. Of course, that's not exactly how it works, but it's close enough to convey the idea. " 

While all games use compression in order to save space on repetitive code, it seems that LZ4 takes this methodology to its zenith, filtering out as many repetitions as possible to reduce the file size of the World of Arc. Assassination in the smallest possible footprint. For more details on Hitman 3's compression technology - as well as other information regarding next-gen console editions - be sure to check out De Pascale's full PC Gamer breakdown.

Hitman 3 releases on the 20th on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. You can check out our own thoughts from Chris Carter on the new sequel in his recent preview.