Red Dead Redemption 2: How to play without waiting for massive file size to download

Get started early and avoid sitting and waiting

Red Dead Redemption 2 is about to arrive. But it's going to take a long time to do so: the game is absolutely huge, and will take hours to download.

It was revealed before the game's release that the PlayStation 4 version is nearly 100GB. And the Xbox One version is even bigger, at around 110GB.

It all means that despite the fact the game is out on Friday it might not actually be available to play until hours after, since such a huge download could take a long time.

To avoid that problem, players are recommended to make sure that they pre-load it before the game actually becomes available. That means it will be all ready on your console as soon as the release date hits, and you'll be able to play it straight away.

Pre-loading has been available for the past week and can be done on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Doing so is the same on both: head to the online store and find the game by searching for it. There, where the button to buy it might be, you should be able to press to download it. (Of course, if you've not yet bought the digital version then you won't be able to download it, and you might have to do that first.)

The same space requirements are needed by the disc version of the game, which will start loading itself onto the console when you first put it in. That should happen much faster than the download – and there's no way of beating it, since the disc shouldn't arrive until the game is out.

It's not clear whether Red Dead Redemption 2 will come with a day one patch, requiring people to download a whole set of updates and patches. That's not possible to pre-load.