Genshin Impact is the massively popular game from miHoYo that features anime-style graphics and a great action role-playing experience with gacha mechanics. But does deleting and reinstalling Genshin Impact save space?
Yes, reinstalling may help tidy up the install and is worth doing every now and then. Your details will all be saved on the cloud and so you won’t lose anything. The best way to reduce the size of the install is to remove unneeded voice files.
Let’s look at how Geshin Impact works in regards to saving data, how to make it run better and how to free up space with the game. We’ll also consider how account saving works and why Genshin Impact is such a large game once installed.
How Do You Free Up Space on Genshin Impact?
There are files you can remove to free up a lot of space for Genshin Impact that won’t impact the game for you in any noticeable way. You can also clean up your Windows install to help free up some storage space, or use an alternative hard drive setup for your console.
Voice Packs
One of these is to remove unwanted voice pack files. The game has been localized into a variety of languages including getting voice actors to do all the lines in the game.
As you may imagine, these voice packs significantly increase the size of the game and for the most part, most people aren’t going to be changing the language of the game to even hear them, so you can safely delete without any issues.
Genshin Impact’s Teyvat comprises three gigantic nations with a huge number of NPCs. Not to mention you can choose from 30 different playable characters, all with their own unique voice lines.
In fact, it’s the case that per language, a voice pack file can have over 4GB of data.
To remove the ones you don’t want, go to the in-game settings and select the Language option. If you go to the bottom-right corner, there is an option you can hit named Manage Voice-Over Files, open that up and then select the ones you don’t want and hit Uninstall.
Disk Cleanup
Disk Cleanup is a built-in tool in Windows that can help you delete temporary files that are taking up a lot of space on your computer.
Tap the Windows key and the letter S to run the Windows Search utility, then type Disk Cleanup and open it up. In the pop-up window, select the drive that you want to free up, generally, it will be your Windows drive which by default will be C: directory.
Put a check next to the items you want to delete and then click OK, and you can go by the file size on the right to make sure you get rid of the big ones.
Console Harddrive Tips
You can manage space on your console by deleting old apps or games that you don’t play or use anymore.
You can access Settings and then select Storage, then System Storage and then remove the ones you don’t need.
You can also upgrade the hard drive by either looking at an additional external drive or upgrading the one you have inside already. Keep in mind that some consoles are limited in their options to adding additional memory as the current drive is permanent.
If You Uninstall Genshin Impact Will You Lose Everything?
Genshin Impact saves all data via your account on the cloud, meaning that as long as you remember your account details, you can uninstall or play from a different device and log back in and all your progress and items will still be there.
Keep in mind that Genshin Impact’s profile will be different per server, so whatever server you originally played on and leveled up on is where all your save data is, so if you’ve logged back into your account and things are missing, confirm you’re on the correct server.
This is easily checked because on the first screen when you login, it will show the server you’re connected to down the bottom. You can tap on it and change to a different server to see if your account comes back with everything that should be there.
You can’t make these changes if you’re on a PlayStation console as servers are locked to whatever region you have set in your PlayStation account. It is possible to go into your PlayStation account and change the region there.
But you may need to swap the server to the one that matches the one linked to the address in your PlayStation account if you’re now playing on PC or some other device.
Depending on the platform you play Genshin Impact on, the game may save screenshots in the game folder rather than in a location like My Documents or in the Steam directory. If you have any you want to preserve, just copy them out of the game folder before uninstalling.
Why Does Genshin Take up so Much Space?
Genshin Impact has a lot of detail in the world which is represented by detailed textures. These will take up a lot of space, and the way modern games work is that the files are compressed when downloaded but then unpacked onto the computer so they are bigger.
Genshin Impact also has many large voice files which will add about 4GB per language. You can follow the above tips on removing unneeded voice packs to help slim down the install substantially.
Genshin Impact also will download files for the next update and keep them alongside the current files, making the install seem a lot more bloated, and truthfully the developer does need to do more work on trimming this down.
When the new content comes out, not all this unneeded material is removed, and others have investigated the mechanics of the game data and found redundant information from past events that should be removed but isn’t.
This leads to the game being much heavier than it should.
