"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" is currently consuming over 200 GB of hard disk space. Shortly after it ballooned to this ridiculous size, we sent out a dire plea: make the game smaller. To our surprise, one studio heard our call and replied, "Yes, we can."

I can't say that Digital Extremes actually responded to us, or that they know our thoughts on the matter, but in an update called "The Great Ensmallening," they moved to a new compression technique for Warframe, He explained that it will reduce the game's install size by more than 6 GB. This figure will likely reach at least 15GB by the time all is said and done. This is a very significant reduction given that system requirements indicate that 50GB of free space is needed (in the current Steam installation, Warframe consumes 40.2GB).

"Not a perfect analogy, but similar to the tradeoff between image quality and file size obtained with different image formats: a PNG is lossless, but the file can be very large; a JPEG file is very small, but visible artifacts from compression JPEG files are very small but may contain visible artifacts from compression," the studio explained in its post.

"The technology we use is called Oodle Texture and we are very happy with the savings.

The bad news is that Warframe players will have to download remastered content to make the magic happen: in order to save the promised 6.6GB, they will have to update 6.5GB. To minimize this hassle, Digital Extremes has divided the update content into three parts, which will be delivered sequentially over the course of the year.

The first update will be an all-new lightmap for Warframe: "We spent a lot of time carefully analyzing the quality of the results, but outside of the most rigorous testing, no one will notice." The studio said, adding that with this new system, "you can easily adjust where you need to be." Games can be formatted compact and fast by default, and resolution can be increased to preserve the quality of special assets (like shelves in the quarters).

We have also included some before-and-after images for those who dare to compare:

Before

After

Before

After

Great Warframe The first of the Ensmallening updates will take place within the next week; the second update will apply the same technology to other textures in Warframe and should result in similar, possibly even greater, drive space savings.