Last Friday, the very good RPG Nier: Automata underwent what the scientific community calls 'puffer-fishification'. That is to say, it suddenly and inexplicably ballooned to over 700% of its original download size, as an update magically transformed the game from a reedy 50 GB lightweight into a 366-GB behemoth.

But it has since hit the Ozempic and is now back down to its regular size. "We have identified the cause and now resolved this issue," tweeted the official Nier X account earlier today. "Apologies for any inconvenience caused."

Notably absent from the bugfix notice was any explanation as to just what had happened. It might be academic at this point, but I for one would love to know how you accidentally make a game seven times bigger without anything changing.

Squenix is keeping schtum, but Rick Lane suggested, in our article last week about the bug, that it might have been related to Nier: Automata's DLC packages. "When selected for download on Steam, each DLC appears to have the same file size as the base game", he noted. "Weirdly though, this is only true for the initial download and installation. Once the game is installed, the file reportedly reverts to a more appropriate size of roughly 50 gigs." Indeed, the suggested temporary workaround for the issue (before Square Enix fixed it) was to uncheck all the DLCs when you installed the game.

So it sure seems like, somehow, the base files for the entire original game got attached to each individual DLC package.

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