Civ VI is NOW PRELOADING.

[Sonereal]

why is the download so small? Only 3,9 gb?

It isn't unpacked yet. When the game goes live in your region, everything will be decrypted/unpacked.

 

[Lord Shadow]

What I meant was that even an MMORPG where it is usually important to keep everyone on an equal footing gave early access for pre-orders, there's no reason why a game like Civ (where there's no such thing as the start dash) can't do the same. It would actually be worth a lot more to me than getting one extra civilization to play in the first 90 days.

But I'm not complaining. Just saying that I'd prefer that more.

The main reason some MMORPGs allow early access for certain players is to stagger server load and have more time to adapt to the volume that would otherwise hit all at once on launch and potentially bring everything down.

There's no similar reason to provide early access to an offline game. The server load staggering function is provided by the possibility to preload. And with day 0 patches not being unusual, I'd rather have at least that under my belt than play an even buggier version for a couple of days. Might have a negative impact.

 

[thecrazyscot]

Guys, i bought it from steam. I need a cd key also? Already downloaded it.

If you bought it from Steam you're good to go. No need to enter separate cd keys.

 

[joncnunn]

why is the download so small? Only 3,9 gb?

It's zipped up; after the download it will unzip. Even on a machine with fast internet that's not metered it's much faster to download the zip file and then extract than to download a full set of uncompressed files.
Zip compression algorithms have gotten better over time.

 

[mnf]

And Civilization has a lot of open text files like its XMLs and LUAs. Those take up a lot more space once they are uncompressed. I'd also imagine preload files are encrypted though...are they? I haven't checked. Not that it matters anymore with the clock ticking.

 

[stealth_nsk]

why is the download so small? Only 3,9 gb?

I just realized a simple thing. The preload is the same content which is packed to physical DVD, so it could be just due to DVD size limit.
This could mean some pieces could be downloaded with the 0-day patch, not just unpacking.

EDIT:

And Civilization has a lot of open text files like its XMLs and LUAs. Those take up a lot more space once they are uncompressed. I'd also imagine preload files are encrypted though...are they? I haven't checked. Not that it matters anymore with the clock ticking.

Their size is unnoticeable, though, compared to video, audio and 3D textures. Which have much worse compression.

 

[xungadrogado]

Could there be a tiny little hope for them to release it today???
Already clicked the civVI Icon on desktop 4 or 5 times today....

gotta get some life lol...

 

[Mort_Q]

Could there be a tiny little hope for them to release it today???

Today? No.

Early? Perhaps by a bit. They went through a lot of effort to arrange a release schedule.

It's still launching earlier than they originally said...

... and I have to work on Friday so whatever.

 

[Olleus]

Still waiting on cdkeys.com to sort things out, still quoting the 21st as release date when it's now the 20th. I notice from their twitter others aren't happy with them.

Ditto.

I'm expecting to be released sometime on Thursday morning.