I know storage is cheap, but nearly half a terabyte? I'm already giving any game the side eye if it takes more than 50G of space on a disk, let alone nearly 10x that.
My guy, if you talk about slow ass HDDs then yes, but games have become so large that you have to have a SSD at least to have enough read speed for reasonable loading time for shaders, textures, etc.
Downloaded dmz for some friends on pc it's 68 so consoles probably see 75-80 if not more
This is BEFORE the fact that On console, each game demands its own space to unpack the entire thing when it tries to update. So on PS5 not only is the game 150gb, but you need 150 free space to update meaning the game is functionally a "ghost" 300gb (I uninstalled cold war over this shit, I don't have time or room on a console for that fucking nonsense)
You'd think, thanks to removing HDDs, we'd no longer need file duplicates (because physics) and games get smaller again. But then you get unoptimized 4k textures and huge language packs for the 10000 hours of cutscenes, which you all have to always download. sigh
is it still worth getting into? it seems like something I'd like but I've never played it before and don't have crazy amounts of time like I used to. should I still give it a go?
I played for a while and it's fun. Definitely worth the price, and IMO it's an easy game to drop for a while and come back to a month later. Helps prevent burning out. If you're the kind of player that needs to 100% everything in a week or two you might find it grueling; there's a ton of progression to do.
It's nice that you can just go on a single mission and it only takes ~1/2 hour, so there's hundreds (thousands?) Of hours of content, but it's all broken into small enough chunks that most people could probably fit it into their schedule.
Absolutely!
I think you can have fun with it, no matter how much time you invest.
It feels like the main focus of the game is just the player to have fun.
On console: Mw2 150gb warzone2 115gb Mw2s "cod hq" for launching games 50gb (the only mandatory one) Mw3 seems to be about 190 looking at articles. (For campaign, zombies and warzone)
They're starting to obfuscate where each thing comes from now with the Cod HQ Launcher to play off the size of the games. As well as let you delete components like zombies and campaign to "save space" that they hoarded.
Never seen Barotrauma, and I think Factorio is just a 2D sprite-based engineering sandbox? But Deep Rock is literally just a (somewhat-blocky) roguelike. Of course constant asset reuse is going to give you a smaller game lmao
It's hard and it particularly slows down the asset production process which is already a disproportionately slow and expensive part of development. Way easier to let the artists go apeshit exporting everything at 8k and a billion polygons because storage is cheap in a production environment.
Compression could help in theory, but then you'd have to decompress assets on the fly which takes a significant amount of processing power. The industry is trying to reduce the latency of getting assets into memory, compression would be moving the other way from that.
If you're conspiratorially minded then you might also conclude that it's to prevent people from having another major live service game installed on base model consoles, making you more likely to keep playing the one you've already installed. A kind of walled garden effect.
I mean I get that decompression can be expensive, but there's nothing stopping them from having a base version of the game with smaller lower quality assets and allowing players that want to download the huge assets do so with a free dlc. Many games have done this in the past.
Why decompress on the fly? For a lot of things the crazy high-res textures aren't needed or appreciated while playing. I downloaded some newer FTP Quake title. It had 30 fucking GB for like a dozen maps or so. It is a god damn arena shooter. You are way to busy jumping around, making fast paced shots and so on, to ever appreciate that the texture is still detailed, when you are pressing your virtual face against ist. And it takes so much more ressources because the texture needs to be loaded in the VRAM and then scaled down anyways because you aren't pressing your face against it.
Better hardware make gamedevs more lazy, remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island) now 100+GB for a below average and unfinished game, back then if you have mid even low end PC you can still enjoy most if not all the games (1990-2009) ever released now devs just know everyone have high end PC to play their 10 minutes games before you got board and play solitaire instead
remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island)
Back then a CD had about as much storage as your entire hard drive. Also, lego island isn't really a AAA game. A AAA game from 1997 would be something like final fantasy 7, which came on two whole CDs. Drive capacity hit a boom around the 2000s and 2010s, and only recently have AAA games been catching up.
People always want to blame this shit on game developers being lazy, and they're not wrong that a lot of AAA games are bug ridden messes designed to please shareholders. But games are getting more and more complex, and these developers are being forced to work under strict time constraints.
That doesn't mean there isn't room to improve. Maybe offering different download options depending on your storage needs should become a common practice (iirc some games used to do that back when internet bandwidth was limited).
Tho shit has changed since then. The quality of audio and video has increased. Especially on the visual side this takes a lot more storage. More polygons and more pixels equal larger size.
Also, if I remember correctly, data is often stored in multiple places to make it more efficient to read it from BluRay or HDDs.
Tho, with SSDs now in everything, the second thing will probably die out.
This is already the case. Even the fastest blu-ray is like 40x slower than the internal SSDs on the PS5 and the XSeX/XSeS, and the largest capacity is only 100GB which isn't even a single Call of Duty.
Games which needs a NASA computer and a half Google server to play it with more than 15 FPS are not necesarly better as some 15 years old games for Win XP, they only have somewhat better graphics.
Remembering old Games, like Black Messiah or Tomb Rider from 2013, which work at >30-50 FPS with a few Gigs HD and less than 4 Gigs RAM, apart of having very good graphics.
New games often also are badly optimized, needing way more min sys specs as needed for the quality they offer.
Someone remember the game kkrieger? A short 3D FPS in a single file with only 96 KB, that is art. It can still be downloaded (abandonware, Windows)
That what I mean. Companies often do not even bother to optimize the games, in order to sell them as quickly as possible. "Works? Ok, let's start next, our CEO's Ferrari needs a repair."
Problem is companies don't care about making their games efficient, they care about keeping production costs down
As long as it's efficient enough to run on medium settings on the average consumer's machine they won't put any more resources towards improving it
Optimising them requires expensive developer time that probably won't affect their sales proportionally (realistically do most people really not buy games just because they can't run them on max settings?) And they've already got the eye candy for their trailers that consumers can technically achieve so they don't bother
Man I haven't thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!
I agree though. I think it's been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn't caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It's just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.
I'd love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.
That is the point, there are a lot of crappy games in Steam and min sys specs of 8 GB RAM free, even for messi sidescrollers. Fortunately there are exceptions, mainly in somewhat older games, where the devs still had to score with quality and playability on the PCs of that time, such as the aforementioned TombRaider series at that time or the DarkMessiah, The Dark Mod that does not need to hide from many commercial games either, and others that prove that even a crappy laptop that cost me €350 can be used to play them with more than 30-40 FPS and without taking up more than a few Gigs.
Also a good source of free games is the IT Academy DigiPen, wich offers a huge catalogue with hundreds of games of any kind, the best works of the students as free download.
Some of these also in Steam, search DigiPen there.
https://games.digipen.edu
kkrieger ironically is solely optimized for hdd storage space and quite inefficient regarding other specs, as all the resources not included readily in those 96KB have to be generated in real time by your computer instead of coming shipped with the game as usual.
Sure, but just like in this game, procedural generation is used in many other games. even currently. The art is to find a balance between space savings and system performance. This is not the problem, because too many times they overdo it, both one and the other, often using prefabricated models to complete it with new characters, environments and plots, which look more and more similar even though they are different. companies. Nice graphics but zero originality and linear plot. Optimize it? Why, when it works in their company computer? Fuck the user, if you want to play, buy a bigger PC, period.
I looked at some of the files in that game and experienced severe pain. Did you know the audio log objects take up like 7gb because the assets are copied in their entirety for each notebook page. So instead of sharing textures for the parts of the notebook each page has its own complete book material in unnecessary resolution. Also pretty sure the audio could be squished down more. Anyway that's just one small part of it. The maps are insanely big in terms of disk size.
Studio Wildcard later identified SDE Inc. as its parent company. SDE Inc. has been described as an affiliate of Snail Games USA, the American branch of the Chinese video game company Snail Games.
It’s getting 100% intentional. I find it ironic when CoD used to be known for being a fairly storage conscious game and now it’s this monstrosity we see before us. Glorified $70 DLC that takes up MORE space than the game it was made for
Why delete unused code and assets or optimize anything when your player base built their personality around your game? They will buy a 3rd SSD at the same time they buy the same game for the 4th time.
When do people stop buying games based off their disk size? 100gb is my limit after that IDC what game it is or how good I'm not getting it. Mark my words if we dont tell these game devs to fuck off with huge sizes or at least get them to make lighter versions without 4k textures and compress the audio or something then we will see 1tb games soon enough
Wow, I never realized Tie Fighter was only 13 mB. Those tattoos alone would probably be images larger than 13 mB these days. I can't imagine how large it would be now.
It would be awesome if Steam could set up a store filter so games over a certain size are hidden from recommendations. I have that for the Roguelike tag.
Honestly, it'd be useful if the store could report to developers what the most common filters are, too, so they take that in their development considerations.
ZFS will do block level deduplication but requires a large table be stored in ram. The issue arises that the cost to increase your ram to keep up with that table size usually ends up being a lot more than just adding more storage.
I do believe most games have an inflated size due to uncompressed assets being included which a file system level compression could help with so long as you have the CPU to spare.