Soon Xbox games might not require full downloads to play

The days of downloading unnecessary data and spending precious hard drive space on features that will never be used may soon be numbered, allowing for faster downloads and more room on hard drives for more games.

A new feature might be coming to both current Xbox One consoles, as well as the upcoming Xbox One X, and according to Digital Foundry, this new feature will be called “Intelligent Delivery”. Intelligent Delivery will split games into tagged chunks and players will then be able to pick what chunks they want to download, either to only download what they need to play their game or download everything that is available.

As it stands today, there are a lot of features that are not used by players. For example, this would mean that those who, for various reasons, don’t want to download the 4K assets for Xbox One X games won’t have to, or they might opt out to download the multi-language support that many games come with, saving huge amounts of storage space. For many sports titles a majority of the of the game’s install size is language specific audio assets, so an Intelligent Delivery system could save players lots of hard drive space.

Tagging parts of the game into chunks will apply to gameplay content as well. It will allow players to delete content they are not using, like multiplayer modes for example. Though Xbox is recommending that this system should only be used for new titles, Intelligent Delivery will work for existing games as well.

As of now, it is still not clear how developers will be using this new feature, or if they will at all since there is no indication of it being mandatory. Though Intelligent Delivery might bring back the days of multiple disc games with essential data on one and optional data on the others.

While we all wait to see what Intelligent Delivery really means, why not check out the Xbox One X giveaway Xbox is hosting?