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.
Just wait for the cracked version, they often reduce the size while they are at it.
Fit girls make fit games
Until you spend the 48 hours of processing time needed to unpack it…
laughs in 13900k
That doesn’t make the unpacked files take less space…
But it makes unpacking them quicker, which is what you originally seemed to be making fun of in regards to fitgirl repacks.
The whole thread is about storage space, I was just exaggerating with the 48 hours comment
By leaving translations and so on out, but they can’t change unoptimized and duplicated but only once used assets in every map.
You can choose to compress files on storage. If on linux. Or use tools like ConpactGUI to compress in windows 10/11.(not recommended to compress live service titles)
Part of the reason for the bulk of course is prerendered video and voice assets, especially if it has multiple voice options. Also non standardization of os level compression means you cannot send those conpressed files for users as not all users could use them if compressed using the methods mentioned above.
Great, let me just whip out my computer science degree to figure out how the fuck to even do that.
You don’t need a computer science degree to downloaded and install a pirated repacked game.
storage is cheap
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.
SSDs are at a good price right now too, but that will probably soon change
Anything >2TB becomes very expensive very quick
Add PCIe 4/5, M.2 form factor, non-2280 length (like SteamDeck) and extra features (if you need them) and they quickly begin zo add up to a point where it’s not feasible to buy it beyond having enough budget to not worry about that fact.
And afaik you’d need PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage to being able to use DirectStorageI was only talking about normal m.2 ssds for pc, console is something different. There aren’t many extra features you meed for gaming. Storage is very cheap right now in comparison to what it used to be but it still isn’t cheap enough for game studios to pull this shit
SSDs sure became cheap and I agree that the game devs are pulling some heavy bs with that stuff. My rig is all flash based (+ an HDD that is for nvidia shadow play so it doesnt write my flash to death for nothing useful. I won’t count that).
But shopping for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 4TB 2280 is very expensive when you compare it to a 4TB HDD or even good desktop 8TB 7200 RPM CMR drive.Usually my backlog is used enough for me to justify not spending the money on >2TB (anything equal or below 2TB is dirt cheap) TLC drives.
Small addition:
4 TB Crucial P3+: 216€
Sabrent Rocket 4TB Q4 M.2: 280€ Samsung SATA 8TB 870 Evo (QLC): 344€
8TB 7200RPM SATA drives (Geizhals link to how I searched): Anything between 145-250€
(Heavily depending on others factors like cache but still cheaper if you have the patience to wait).
8TB 2280 M.2 SSDs: Starting at 780€.Yes the costs are coming down and 5 years ago you would probably be ballin to even think about 8TB in flash as a consumer. In another 5 years SSDs may become so cheap per TB that only € per TB would make a HDD feasible until you start to put SSDs in a 3.5" enclosure and arent constrained by the 2.5" form factor. The cost quickly gets out of hand at some point for a consumer just for having to wait 20 seconds to one minute.
Hope I made my stance clear: It’s cheap. Until it isn’t (for a consumer)
Indeed but the drop in prices for what I considered the normal sizes gives me a little bit of hope for the bigger drives, I would really love a 4/8tb drive so I don’t have to worry about storage again but that will have to wait some time
Makes you wonder when they will start distributing games on SSDs
Each main cod is 150gb now
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)
PS4/5 does that unpack replace model for updates. Xbox on the otherhand applies the changes directly to the old version.
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
An order of magnitude more. It’s nearly half a terabyte.
Yeah whoops, brain said terabyte but fingers said gigabyte.
Meh, it’s early. But it’s Friday!
I think you meant “half a terabyte”, but given its obviously just an oversight I’m probably just nitpicking.
No, I can’t believe you. I don’t want to believe you. A +400GB game, come on. Seriously.
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.
Your consile is a whole CoD machine now, only by accident, not that someone intended to do so
Seems like something that could be intentional
ARK survival evolved with all its DLCs is ~450 :')
To be fair to Ark, it has 9 massive maps, and with the exception of the main one, you can install only the ones you want to play on.
massive maps
Data points in the range of Gigabytes (uncompressed), the rest is unoptimized textures and models, duplications and other bullshit. Bet you could get 10 or so fps more, if they invested a few days for optimzations.
IIRC ark stores each model. If the island has 1000 trees, it stores the model of each of them, instead of having 1 model and copy-pasting it. Neither CoD not ark care a single bit for their storage needs.
Heh, a single bit
I don’t get why modern AAA refuses to compress / distribute lower storage requirement assets.
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.
Or like in mobile games (WoTB, PUBG) you have the option to download “HD-textures”.
Yeah that’s what I was trying to say, couldn’t think of a specific example of the top of my head tho lol
Woah. That was a fine idea, but a free DLC? Management isn’t going to like that concept.
Nothing except the work of creating lower quality assets and splitting off the HD stuff into a separate download. Totally doable and I’d love to see it, but I doubt studios will commit the man hours unless they can be convinced that it will really make the game sell better.
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.
Enough reviewers giving the ratings that influence sales of a game claim to care.
Requires effort. Also I’m thoroughly convinced hardware and software companies do it on purpose.
It’s like the whole wearing Nike as your sponsor, the devs are paid to make it badly optimized so customers are encouraged to buy new tech.
Yeah, that’s a fairly harmless conspiracy to believe, I’m in.
Isn’t that exactly what most PS5 games do?
Meanwhile, I’m playing an indie game that’s less than a gig and enjoying it. But I’m not much for fps games.
Planet crafter needs, with one big map, 3GB disk space and loads from menu in 1 second. Just for comparison.
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).
Final fantasy 7 was 3 CD on PlayStation and 4 CD-ROMs for the windows version.
I know, I was there.
UT 2k4 was a seven CD box, just saying. Yes, 7.
Oh I remember that, the Linux installer was included on the CDROM, it was very unusual for that time!
Yeah, it was one of the few games that actually shipped with Linux binaries. Also after like 8 months, they released a huge update with some 10 new maps, new characters and a new game mode as a free download instead of calling it a “DLC” and charging money for it. Back when games were actually made to be played instead of being a marketing platform.
Some games still do AoE 4 has the HD assets as an optional DLC so you can decide whether it’s worth the drive space/download time.
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.
True but they should have take more time and optimize their games
You can only optimize 4K textures so much that they drop right back to “FHD” or sub HD quality. 4K is big.
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.
Tho shit has changed since then. The quality of audio and video has increased
That’s a bad thing and we can and should go back.
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)
War Thunder coming in being an 11 years old game and still needing a NASA computer to run with graphics that look like the PS2 era.
To be fair Old games that have had a shit ton of updates usually get bogged down overtime Especially if they weren’t expecting anything large scale
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.
They legitimately don’t even try optimizing anymore.
what for, people pay big money either way for it
Which is just sad.
Because it’s the only game your console will have with the shitass packing they do
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.
What do you mean unused code, there are 3 complete unused games in there.
Download >100Gb = 5 maps, obviously
Of course, everyone knows you start development of a new game from the code base of the previous, but you aren’t allowed to change or delete any of the old code, you need to copy paste the functions and append a version number. It’s called version control.
CoD players won’t play another games because there’s not enough storage left to install another games? Sounds like what Activision would do.
I swear ark survival evolved is a fucking zip bomb. There is no way that game is 350gb and has been for years. I had to install it on a second drive.
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.
Can’t blame Western developers on this one.
410.13 GB? ARE YOU SERIOUS?
System req for the newest is 150gb, or half of that if you already have 2 other games installed
Why in the ungodly flying fuck fallen from hooker heavens is this game half a terabyte??
Ark: Survival Evolved is a Chinese developer. It’s the worst offender so far as I know.
that space required is bigger than my games collection and downloads and the family photos combined
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
This is what happens man. I started computer gaming with Rocky’s Boots (90kb), Tie Fighter (13mb), Doom (2.39mb), Wing Commander (5.1mb).
I had this same reaction when I saw a game that was 100mb, then 500mb (THAT’S HALF A GIG!), then a full 1 GB!
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.
I’ve off the greatest games ever made, not to mention Star wars games, IMO.
Had an awesome storyline.
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.
Postal 2 (10GB Storage, 128MB RAM, 32MB GPU)
I absolutely do not care, storage is cheap. If it means the game has more & higher quality assets I’m all for it. An extra SSD or two never hurts.
Not an opinion I agree with, but it’s total valid if those are your preferences.
Except when you’ve got Microsoft making a deal with Seagate to have proprietary expansions at 150 dollars a TB.
storing 400gb is still nearly the cost of the game itself
I thought this was a joke at first.
