Nintendo Switch’s LEGO City Undercover brings up storage issue

LEGO City Undercover is launching on the current crop of consoles soon, but the Nintendo Switch version will have some interesting install challenges.

LEGO City in all, well most, of its glory

So this is a story in two parts, and both of them are interesting. And quite honestly, it’s all possibly quite telling for the future of gaming on the Nintendo Switch. As you know, the Switch uses game carts/cards, since it’s also a handheld console. That’s radically different than everything else out there right now, which all use Blu Ray discs.

It serves a purpose, and it’s actually kind of cool to be using what could be called a retro storage medium. It does however, present a problem. According to Polygon, the manufacturing costs on the cards go up with the amount of storage that they offer. Kind of easy to imagine that. And LEGO City? It needs a good chunk of storage.

So what does that result in? In short – it results in a 13gig download on day one. What exactly is included in this download is unknown, but Warner Bros has clarified things since the original article ran. Industry site MCV is now reporting that, although there is that whopper of  download, it’s not a necessity to actually run the game.

So what does this mean?

Does that mean that LEGO City Undercover will offer less of an experience than other versions without the download? We don’t know, but it sounds like this might open up a possible future mess for Switch owners. While Nintendo’s first party games are unlikely to need anything like this, third-party games that require a GB-heavy day one download might become the norm. If Nintendo’s new emphasis on third party stuff actually goes somewhere, I actually can’t imagine that not happening.

And given that the console includes a paltry 26GB of usable space out of the box, that’s a gigantic issue. At the very least, it means that gamers will have to buy additional storage, and at the worst it might mean that those who can’t afford that storage will be unable to play some games. That’s not great, and it’s especially bad for a console that is fighting to basically revive a brand in the home arena after the disastrous Wii U era.

For right now though, it does appear tat LEGO fans will be able to slap the card into their Switch’s and play, download or no. Just what condition the game’s world will be in, will be something that players will have to discover when it arrives on the console, as well as the Xbox One and PS4, on April 4th.

Source: MCV