World of Warcraft is a massive MMORPG – it also consumes a lot of storage 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 data size. What was a nearly “cute” game of just 4 GB at the time has now grown by leaps and bounds – and it shows no signs of stopping.
We take a look at how drastically WoW has grown over the years.
You can see the trailer for the next WoW expansion The War Within here:
Where does the data come from? The Reddit user factor3x recently compiled the sizes of the different game versions of World of Warcraft. The colleagues at Icy-Veins then created a graphic illustrating the increase in required hard drive space:
Where once a simple HDD with 4 GB of free space was sufficient, the demand has significantly increased. Not only does the upcoming expansion “The War Within” require a whopping 128 GB of free space – that’s 32 times more than during Vanilla – but now an SSD drive is also required. But that’s probably not surprising, as such data volumes would likely lead to loading times in the minutes range with a regular hard drive.
How WoW has grown over the years: The (relatively speaking) biggest jump was made by World of Warcraft with the introduction of The Burning Crusade. The game grew from 4 GB to 10 GB – significantly more than a doubling. However, in absolute numbers, there have been many expansions that added significantly more:
- Cataclysm 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:
| Expansion | Size of the Expansion | Total Size of WoW |
|---|---|---|
| Vanilla | 4 GB | 4 GB |
| The Burning Crusade | 6 GB | 10 GB |
| Wrath of the Lich King | 5 GB | 15 GB |
| Cataclysm | 10 GB | 25 GB |
| Mists of Pandaria | 5 GB | 30 GB |
| Warlords of Draenor | 5 GB | 35 GB |
| Legion | 10 GB | 45 GB |
| Battle for Azeroth | 25 GB | 70 GB |
| Shadowlands | 30 GB | 100 GB |
| Dragonflight | 20 GB | 120 GB |
| The War Within (preliminary) | 8 GB | 128 GB |
What takes up so much space? The biggest space consumers in games are usually not the files responsible for the actual world – but media. Especially videos, such as the high-resolution intro videos of an expansion, as well as cutscenes from recent years take up a lot of space and cause World of Warcraft to be considerably bloated.
Of course, more and more voiced dialogues and higher resolution textures also take up space – but this is relatively minor compared to the videos (and the duration they are displayed in the game).
Why is The War Within so small? Critics might point out that The War Within brings “only” 8 GB of new data. However, this is not an indication that the expansion will also be small in content. Because the data is missing the cutscenes, which usually take up a lot of space. Furthermore, the content from future major patches that will surely be released during The War Within is also missing here. This means that the entire story of World of Warcraft continues to grow.
It can therefore be expected that The War Within will grow significantly beyond 128 GB by the time of its release.
