So my understanding is Dragonborn is approximately 800 MB in size, which confuses and concerns me. I am a Borderlands 2 player as well, and the recently released Torgue DLC was a whopping 2 GB and while I have no clue how large the dlc is itself, it typically doesn't feel as massive as Bethesda dlc. This has me worried that Dragonborn is going to be some overly hyped small affair, but the trailer seems to paint DB as anything but.

So I guess if Dragonborn is a pretty large and awesome dlc, why is the file size so small? I know the file size for Pirate's Booty (the first Borderlands dlc) was approximately 1.3 GB and it didn't take me very long to get through it. To my (limited) understanding, file size = content. Is this wrong or right?

Read the leaks.


Compare it to Campaign of Carnage.


And Remember. Borderlands 2 has Cutscenes which takes alot of space. Skyrim Doesn't have any cutscenes.

Bethesda's got some kind of top secret compression technique. All DLC on Xbox must at or below 2GB. It'll be larger than Dawnguard, and I got waaay more hours out of Dawnguard than I did Pirate's Booty. I think I got more hours out of Hearthfire than Pirate's Booty. They're two different styles of games, and neither of them make for good comparisons. Just compare it to Dawnguard.

Dawnguard is supposesdly half the size of Dragonborn.

So, maybe infer getting around double to 1.8x the amount of hours you got from Dawnguard.

Dawnguard didn't add much land mass though, which is why I'm really confused. You had the Soul Cairn as a new area, but it was pretty much empty and you only were there for like 3 hours tops, and let's all be honest, no one goes back to the Soul Cairn once you are done. The only other big area was the place with Auriel's temple (can't recall the location's name) and then the two keeps. I don't know what the total landmass for all of that added up would be equal too, but it didn't feel that large. If DB is adding a whole new island with lot's of new stuff, one would think it would take up some space. I mean, didn't Shivering Isles take up a few gigabytes?

If it has something to do with how Bethesda is compressing the files, then that would make sense, but just comparing it to Dawnguard... I don't know. I had fun with Dawnguard, but I tend to RP and take my time. Even doing that, it only lasted me 20 hours tops, and a lot of the Dawnguard content was underwhelming to be entirely honest. Solid storyline yeah, but afterward I felt like I had all these leftovers that I didn't know what to do with.

The main hogs when it comes to storage space is cutscenes and textures. Skyrim, and by extention Dragonborn, don't really do cutscenes in any form or fasion, and they reuse a lot of textures. The next hog for space is recorded voices for the npcs. Landmass, if I'm as well informed as I hope I am, doesn't take up all to much as long as it uses the same grass and snow as Skyrim.