Why is this game 39GB in size on PS4?

[Shioban]

Its 10.8GB on my PC so why is it 39GB on PS4? I'm not complaining, just wondering why.

FFXIV:ARR (aswell as FFXIV 1.0 and FFXI) compress all their data into .dat's

Essentially the build is compacted into these dats to reduce the client download (on the PC version), which is then unpacked from your disk drive and then loaded into memory.

Technically it's better to avoid this as it required uncompressing the .dat's everytime it require a file from said .dat (the game unpacks certain essential files on launch).

By avoiding the .dats (Which they seemed to have done for the PS4 version) you avoid having to process an uncompression leaving the PS4 to just load the files in (which saves on processing time, memory and disk drive usage to an extent).



As you can see with the image above this is pretty much the entire game compressed into DAT's which lead to a hierarchy of sub-sequent DAT's.

Each one is (partially) encrypted and compressed meaning the PC has to run a process multiple times to retrieve the files, albiet very quick it's still eating up processing time and memory.