Does this game really take up 40 gigs now? On Steam and Origin it required something like....25GB. What exactly is almost doubling the size?
Or is this just how much space you need to install, and it'll shrink back to around 25 once it's done installing?

Edit:
It really is 40 gigs. What the hell happened?

If the game really contains all languages, including voice-overs, as https://www.gog.com/forum/dragon_age_origins_ultimate_edition/english_text_only/post2 claims, this might account for much of the extra size. On Steam at least, only the language you select in the right-click preferences dialog thing for the game are downloaded from the Steam servers.

So can I delete the extra sound files then? I know I can for some games that have excessive sound files like Star Wars TFU.

It should probably be safe to delete the de-de, fr-fr, ... (everything except en-us, if you want to play in English) folders from all audio/vo/ subdirectories. I can't guarantee anything, though. :P

From my Steam install, the big ones (at least for en-us) are in:
packages/core/audio/vo/
modules/single player/audio/vo/en-us/
Addins/dao_prc_ep_1/module/audio/vo/

The other ones are in:
packages/core_ep1/audio/vo/
docs/EA Help/
Offers/dao_prc_ocp_2/module/audio/vo/
Offers/dao_prc_onrx_1/module/audio/vo/
Offers/dao_prc_ocp_1/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_cp_3/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_drk/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_nrx_1/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_cp_1/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_gib/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_str/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_str/core/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_cp_2/module/audio/vo/
Addins/dao_prc_lel/module/audio/vo/

But those are small enough to not matter, I'd say.

The GOG version of the game is still downloading for me, so I can't say for certain whether there's anything else.

That frees up quite a bit of space, but I did find some localization .bik files. That'd be the remainder of the extra crap. However, there's no US folder that time, French and German both have large files, as well as I'm guessing Polish.
These would be found under
"dragon age game directory\modules\single player\locale"

Ah, okay, that one doesn't exist in my Steam install. I thought all videos had separate audio tracks and the Bink files only contain the actual video portion?

I was wondering the same thing, i didnt remember the origin or steam versions being so large. Thanks for the tip about deleting the localization files. Hopefully one of the Gog.com guys will chime in on if this will harm their version of the game. Im dangerously low on HDD space after installing this, so i needed to delete some of those big foreign audio files.

And kudus on another trek alum hanging around here, McCoy ;)

Yeah, i'd like to know which files are the other languages that can be deleted myself. 40+GB is a bit big for me too.

My Origin installation, including all the DLC & mods, is 36.1GB. Don't forget that Ultimate includes lots of content and campaigns not present in the original version of Dragon Age: Origins.

I'm sure the difference is in the mods and textures I have installed--plus I keep all of my mods in their original compressed state on top of installing them so that should I want to uninstall and then reinstall them, etc., I won't have to download them again. This is something I do with all my games. I have 2.4 terabytes of drive space total and will be adding more soon...;) I also have some 250 games installed from GOG, Steam, and Origin, but still have roughly ~.7 terabytes to spare. Plus non-game applications. Drive space has never been cheaper, so it doesn't bother me.

What exactly does this have to do with the fact that the game is 20ish gigs on Origin and 40 here? I thought this was the topic about file size here not "LOL do even terabyte bro? Wanna watch me bench press my 3.5 drive?"

Don't you already have your answer. It's the multi-language files.

I just installed the GoG version last night. Thanks for getting this game GoG!

Clean install was 36 GB. After stripping a lot of the alternate language stuff (Mostly in Audio/Vo). It's at 23 GB. If you really wanted to go nuts you could probably getting a bit smaller. At some point someone will probably write a cleanup script to strip out all the alternate language stuff.

I have no clue...was simply chiming in to say that my Origin install weighs in @ ~36GB. Someone else construed my simple observation as some sort of "challenge" (lol), so I thought I'd explain why the numbers might be different in my case. (There is always someone to gainsay you no matter what, it seems)...However, the last post in the thread ahead of mine (by Peter Scott) seems to explain it--for those folks still curious about it (*snicker*..."mystery of the ages" and what not...! People get bent out of shape by the simplest of things--human nature I guess.) But, no, the size of the installation is certainly of no major import to me--and I should hope to no one else, either. I honestly don't care if a game hits 80GBs installed--so long as it is worth the storage space!...;)

In other news...this game was really great when it was released! It's a Classic, imo. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the topic of interest to me is what possessed EA to deviate from the RPG formula that I liked so much in DA:O Ultimate...? I never bought DA2 due to lack of interest as they changed the character of the game, and the trial version of Inquisition simply left me utterly underwhelmed--very disappointed with where they took the series. I had high hopes for Inquisition--and now I cannot *talk myself* into buying it. Anyway, delighted to see that GOG has picked up Ultimate--I think it's by far the best in the series.

Well, there are people who are running low on free space and are quite happy if they can jettison not needed data, like voice-overs in languages they don't understand. And considering that the Steam install weights half amount the GOG install does, the question if anything can be removed was pretty obvious, I'd think.

Me, I have Dragon Age: Origins three times on my HDD now: the original Regular Edition bought in a brick-and-mortor retail store, the Ultimate Edition from Steam and now this here GOG release of the Ultimate Edition. Yeah, that's right, I bought the same game multiple times... The GOG release is certainly superior in my eyes, especially because of all languages being present, but also because the Steam version forces Steam to be running, which is a bit of a pain on Linux. I just wish the GOG version wouldn't phone home and I'm also a bit surprised they kept the DLC ERF archives encrypted, but that's neither here nor there.

I for one would really love a GOG release of Dragon Age II, preferably also in some kind of Ultimate Editions including the DLCs.

I'm still a bit annoyed that EA pulled Dragon Age II from Steam. I refuse to install Origins (and I heard it runs a bit wonky in Wine on Linux too), and that you then need to buy BioWare points to buy the DLC... that just annoys me to no end. The packs of BioWare points don't even cleanly fit into what you need to pay for the combined DLCs (IIRC), so I'd basically have wasted left-over points, which is wasted money. That's F2P MMO tactics.