LEGO City: Undercover’s a pretty good game, scoring 7/10 in our review. It’s also pretty big, not just in terms of gameplay hours but the actual file size – which goes some way to explaining why the load times are so intrusive during the game.
The size? Approximately 22 GB, which pushes it outside of the 25 GB or so that the Premium Wii U comes with onboard. That means if you choose to buy the game from the eShop for Wii U it’ll require you to have an external drive attached.
However, despite the relative internet commotion this morning as excitable posts go up declaring this the ultimate downfall of the system, this has been the point since well before the Wii U came out.
“Both the 8 GB Basic Set and 32 GB Deluxe Set Wii U systems have enough internal storage space to store save data for large numbers of games purchased through retail and to support a limited amount of download activity through the Nintendo eShop for Wii U,” says the official Nintendo site.
“If you wish to download more content, we recommend an external USB storage device with a dedicated power source so that you can expand your storage capabilities for Wii U software.”
Whilst it may well confuse a few at the point of purchase, this shouldn’t really be a big deal for anyone familiar with the system and technology, especially those with an internet connection speedy enough to make such a huge download a viable option.
My advice: buy it on disk. It’ll be cheaper, and you won’t have to connect up that external USB hard drive. The Wii U’s storage is clearly aimed at downloading indie games, with full titles on there as an optional extra for those really wanting all their stuff at the touch of a button.
Dom El
I’m waiting to see whether Monster Hunter is too big to download to my Wii U, as it’s the kind of game I’ll hang onto and play to death but I have no interest at the moment in sticking an external hard drive on there..
Does anyone know whether the load times are improved by having a downloaded copy of Lego City? I’m still buying it on disc, just interested if there was a significant difference.
hazelam
good and bad really, bad that the machine comes with so little storage as standard, but good that you can use external storage.
something not offered by the other two consoles.
actually now i think about it, the 360 does, but only 16 gigs worth last i checked, they may have changed that since though.
JesseDeya
Far from ideal though, imagine if all consoles took this approach! The underside of multi-console owners like myself would look like a data center.
IMHO the PS3 has got it 100% right, allowing you to swap out the internal drive for one of your choice. Not only is it much cheaper than external drives, but the speeds are considerably better, you can upspec the drive (7200rpm or SSD if you want) and of course power consumption, heat output and footprint are all unchanged.
The ‘just buy it on disc’ advice only stretches so far. What if Ninty start offering a PS Plus type service?
At least Ninty haven’t made the external storage proprietary (hello Vita), but which ever way you cut it all they have done is discreetly shift some of the total cost of ownership from the rrp sticker price back to the consumer post purchase. This is exactly how MS made the 360 cheaper than the PS3 back in the day – no wifi, small proprietary HDDs, no rechargeable batteries in the controller, no built in optical out, DVD instead of HD-DVD or Bluray… lots of neat tricks to make the console seem cheaper.
It’ll be interesting to see how they stop hackers from reverse engineering things with games stored on ext hdds (if they haven’t already).
pitbullmern
The xbox360 will now allow up to 32gb external storage now. still not great but better than 16gb
Bladesteel
Does the external storage use usb 3? If not people should really avoid buying big games as downloads (unless the wiiu disc drive is really slow)
JesseDeya
No, it’s USB 2.0. The blu-ray drive apparently has a read speed (theoretical) of 22.5mb/s, so a USB 2.0 drive would be about the same give or take, in theory it could be slightly quicker with the typical sustained read speed for a USB external HDD being ~30mb/s (no faster). How they perform on Wii U’s USB interface I have no idea, could be worse depending on the controller they have used.
By comparison, the PS3 BR drive reads at 9mb/s (2x CAV) and the PS4 BR will reportedly read at 27mb/s (6x CAV), so the Wii U BR speeds aren’t too shabby – what let’s it down is no guarenteed internal storage to install to means everything has to be streamed off disc regardless.
An internal drive you could put in a PS3 such as the Seagate 1tb can have sustained transfer speeds of ~115mb/s which is why I clearly think this is a much better way to go. Don’t even get me started on the stupidity of the 360’s 16mb flash drive limitations. At least it has a HDD I guess :/.