A 1 GB patch, and 212 GB stays 212 GB

Update 01.002.000 reached PlayStation 5 on 13 November, six days before the game unlocks. It weighs 1,073 MB, it is labelled mandatory, and it installs itself whether or not the console’s owner asks for it. Everything in that sentence except the date comes from console-side observation rather than publisher statement: the version number and the size are the PlayStation Game Size account’s, the mandatory flag is what the console displays, and the split rollout — roughly half of pre-loaded consoles at around midday UK time, the remainder about eleven hours later — is the shape several trackers reported independently. Rockstar has published no changelog, no notes, and not one sentence acknowledging that the file exists. Neither has Sony. A mandatory download that installs five days before launch, described by nobody who made it, is the situation, and it is worth holding apart from the arithmetic below, which is measurement rather than announcement.

Two numbers describe this file and only one of them is about a buyer’s drive. The download is 1,073 MB. The installed package grew by about 35 MB, measured after the update applied on the Australia/New Zealand and Japan builds — and that total is testable against the file-level deltas in circulation since. Two containers are named: “story000-[GameContent]” and “Levels(americas)-0”. The pair of deltas that sums to the measured increase is 15.75 MiB and 15.625 MiB, which is 31.4 MiB, or 32.9 MB. Set that against the download and roughly three per cent of what a console fetches is new bytes. The other 97 per cent replaces data that was already sitting on the drive, which is what an update to a 212 GB install does: it rewrites blocks and re-signs them, and the net change is a rounding error on the whole.

The figure most coverage printed is the other one, and it does not survive addition. ComicBook, Tech Times, IT之家 and 3DM all give the second container as 35.75 MiB rather than 15.625. Taken at their word, the patch added 51.5 MiB — 54 MB — to a package that the same datamine reports as growing 35 MB. A 19 MB discrepancy between two figures from one source is not rounding, and the version of the story that travelled is the one whose parts do not add up. This site’s reading is that the smaller pair is the datamine and the larger arose in transcription, but the durable point is structural: a number can be copied ten thousand times and remain wrong, and the only thing that caught this one was a subtraction anyone could have done. It also disposes of the sentence nearly everyone wrote next, that the patch moves the install from 212 GB to 213.

On a console, 212 GB plus 33 or 35 MB is still 212 GB. A storage screen reporting a decimal place will not visibly move at that increment, so the figure a buyer checks before launch does not change at all — and the question this site left open on 29 October, put again on 4 November and again on 8 November, now has an answer made of bytes instead of inference. Whether the 212 GB already contained a day-one patch: it did not. The patch arrived three days after the pre-load opened and landed on top of it. What also changes is the advice about free space. Sony’s instruction before the pre-load was to clear a minimum of 212 GB of storage space, and a console that cleared exactly that has nothing left for a 1,073 MB download; firmware has never applied an update without room to hold it first. Nobody has published the working-space requirement, which is why the safe instruction is now a couple of gigabytes of headroom rather than the minimum the page named.

The rollout is a schedule rather than an event, and it says something about who holds which build. Half of the pre-load cohort got the file on the 13th and the rest about eleven hours later, so both halves were complete five days before unlock and no one’s launch night depends on this particular download. What it does mean is that the build a pre-orderer pulled on 10 November was superseded within 72 hours, and that the version reviewers are playing is not the one already on millions of consoles. Reviews are reportedly due on 18 November, a date Rockstar has not confirmed. 3DM reported that reviewers hold the game and are barred by non-disclosure from describing the update; whether their build carries 01.002.000 or something later is unpublished, and it is the difference between reviews of the launch build and reviews of a build nobody else has.

One more requirement sits inside the file and has not been in a headline. 01.002.000 installs on PS5 system software 14.22.00.00, the firmware Sony shipped on 2 November; Tech Times reports that the game’s minimum moved from 14.10 to 14.22 in the same window, and that the 2 November firmware was 1.267 GB by itself. For a console that has been offline since the summer, that is a two-download problem on launch day: a system update first, then the patch, then the game. Both are trivial on a working connection and neither is trivial at 23:50 on the 19th. What stays unmeasured is the only thing the gigabyte was meant to buy — whether the story and level data rewritten here is a fix anyone will feel. Two file names cannot answer that, Rockstar has said nothing, and the first honest reading of it arrives with the reviews on the 18th or with a retail copy on the 19th.