Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: The Reignited but Separated Spyro Trilogy

The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, remasters of the original PSOne Crash Bandicoot games for current generation platforms, was a good sales success. So, Activision unsurprisingly moved on to do the same for the Spyro the Dragon games with the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. The N. Sane Trilogy proved how there was a large audience that fondly remembered the old games developed and published by Naughty Dog and Sony, and thought it was a pity that Activision’s efforts weren’t quite as good. That also applies to Spyro, whose games were developed by Insomniac.

But Activision is making a key change with how they’re distributing the Spyro trilogy compared to the Crash one, and it’s upsetting a portion of the very audience this collection its appealing to. The N. Sane Trilogy contained every game on disc for the physical versions (or card, in the Switch version’s case), but this would only be the case for the first game on the Spyro trilogy. Initial reports stated that the second and third games would require for purchasers to download them, even though the audience purchases physical copies to avoid that. It didn’t appear the remasters of PSOne games were big enough that all the content couldn’t  fit on a disc, so it appeared as if this was one of Activision’s classic shenanigans.

It didn’t help that Activision was apparently did something similar with Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII, which required a 50GB patch on day one. That’s a large-enough patch that it felt like the download was the game, especially since it’s unplayable without it. Most of the game may not be contained within the patch, but it sure makes the disc sound less worthwhile; to a lesser extent, that issue will also exist with the Reignited Trilogy.

As it turns out, those earlier reports about the trilogy’s downloads aren’t completely accurate now, likely thanks to a change made when it was delayed from September 21st to November 13th (that’s tomorrow). Instead of downloading the full games, physical purchasers will only have to download half the second and third games. That’s an improvement, but the same criticisms still apply with the entire games not being on the physical disc. It felt like Activision was leaving a portion of the games off the disc to drive people to digital.

This is format is similar to what several third-party Switch titles have resorted to, as several games that don’t fit on the 16GB cards need additional downloads, like Doom, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and LA Noire. But in those cases, they legitimately don’t have the room to work with on the cards Nintendo offers them. Now, other platforms are getting in on the action with Activision’s titles, and their owners aren’t happy.

In fairness, the trilogy is larger than many expected. Anyone downloading the trilogy digitally will need to have a whopping 67.5GB of hard drive space available, and/or will have to allocate a little under that amount of space if they have an ISP who’s imposed an archaic download cap on them. Thos purchasing physical copies will have a nearly 20GB download waiting for them to acquire the remainder of the second and third games. The sizes are insane for remasters of PSOne games, so you can’t blame anyone who was skeptical of the insinuation that all the games wouldn’t fit on a 50GB disc, especially given the company involved.

In fact, it easily dwarfs the size of the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, which required a comparatively paltry 23GB download on PS4. The Switch version came in even smaller thanks to the lower required resolutions and less detailed environments, which only required a mere 5.2GB download.

This leaves one question: Why in the holy hell is this such a big download? It’s worth noting that the Spyro trilogy is also larger in size than several recent AAA games. It’s more than twice the size of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, dwarfs Marvel’s Spider-Man, and even tops Battlefield V. The only ostensible reason for this would be due to all the assets being uncompressed; but even then, the size still sounds insane.

Of course, another way around this would have been to include two discs, so all the necessary data could have been in the physical package. This would have made it similar to Red Dead Redemption 2, which requires a hefty 89GB download for anyone installing or downloading it to the PS4. But it seems Activision didn’t want to shoulder that cost, despite the good chance of Spyro selling well.

For anyone not bothered by this, or was purchasing the digital version regardless, it sounds like this reamster job is as good as the one given to the Crash Bandicoot trilogy. For everyone else, it’s unlikely that Activision will rerelease this collection with most of the content on one or two discs, so these are the techniques we’ll have to deal with in the future. It won’t be a good one for physical collectors.