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Time to mech a move: Titanfall is out today (and you’ll want to let it download overnight)

Playing Titanfall is like being a Russian doll. This game is the Stacking of murder sims.

Microsoft would quite like Titanfall to be the thing the Xbox One has over the PS4, and so they and EA have done everything in their power to make sure you don’t forget about it. But just in case you had: Titanfall’s out today on the PC, and according to our Titanfall review it’s rather good too.

If you’re planning on playing it pretty sharpish, a warning: you might want to get started downloading and installing the thing.

There’s the relatively unhefty 20GB download from Origin you’ll be expecting after purchase. But beyond that, you should also be expecting a long wait while the game unpacks to its full 48GB install size.

Why? Well: 38GB of that is uncompressed audio that Xbox One players don’t need to worry about – because the console has audio decode built into its hardware.

Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker said the huge install size was a concession to low-spec machines, which otherwise couldn’t dedicate enough power to audio.

“We have audio we either download or install from the disc, then we uncompress it. We probably could have had audio decompress off disc but we were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio,” Baker told Eurogamer.

“So it’s almost all audio. On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”

It’s worth it, though: read our Titanfall beta impressions for more on what’s so great about strolling the streets wearing a shit-eating grin and a metal exoskeleton. Have you bought in early?