Larian has finally confirmed that preloading won’t be available, apparently because of a limitation with Steam.

  • CALIGVLA@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    What in the fuck. Can devs please start compressing this shit better? I know this is more of a me problem, but this is like half my SSD just for this game alone. Ridiculous.

    • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I know this is more of a me problem

      Naw naw fuck that fam, this is very much a them problem. 122gb is fucking ridiculous.

      • iNeedScissors67@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I was going to install CoD: Cold War from PS+ on my PS5 since I wanted to check out the campaign but I’d never buy it. Fuckin 230 GB for that shit. I lol’d a bit and moved on to something else. So ridiculous.

        • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Lmao 230gigs fuck that. Sitting here cursing my own life because I have 10 gigs of Sims 4 mods. For 230GB the game better come with a hologram that pops out of a USB port to suck my fucking cock.

          • iNeedScissors67@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            The only games I’ll bother keeping installed that are over 100gb are my ESO with all the addons on PC, and Star Wars Battlefront II on PS5, and only because my friends and I play co-op every Friday night. But it’s still ludicrous. My most played game recently, Battlebit Remastered, is a whopping 3 GB lol.

          • Zahille7@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I think the largest game I’ve ever installed on any of my devices was like 120gb, and that was The Master Chief Collection so that makes bit of sense.

      • Raji_Lev@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Just one more reason why the obsession with the latest greatest OMGWTF HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS is the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Atari Jaguar.

        • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          We can compress textures into ridiculously small sizes, I doubt it’s a problem. Audio on the other hand…

          In a dialogue heavy game such as this one, each voice line for each language must be shipped with the game on steam. There’s no way to split the downloads between regions and languages from within developer console on steam.

          I think it’s one of the most popular requests devs posted in the dev forums.

    • ZickZack@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Standard lossless compression (without further assumptions) is already very close to being as optimal as it can get: At some point the pure entropy of these huge datasets just is not containable anymore.

      The most likely savior in this case would be procedural rendering (i.e. instead of storing textures and meshes, you store a function that deterministically generates the meshes and textures). These already are starting to become popular due to better engine support, but pose a huge challenge from a design POV (the nice e.g. blender-esque interfaces don’t really translate well to this kind of process).

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      What they need to do is utilize steam’s branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.

      The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have “great on deck” be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don’t need at 800p

    • EvaUnit02@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.

    • that_one_guy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m sure that what can be compressed is compressed in these game files. What we really need is more intelligent assets. When downloading, the platform should take your localization settings and only download the assets required for that locale. I bet this would heavily reduce the size of many of these games.

      • crystalcorvid@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’d be willing to bet that the game will be available in a compressed format from a repack site with no content loss. At least 30% smaller. A recent example that I just checked, Forspoken, Original Size: 103.9 GB Repack Size: from 63.6 GB

        Before I had an unlimited connection for monthly bandwidth usage I would frequently download an already purchased game from the repack site and then have steam “repair” it. Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War come to mind specifically. Saved so much of my limits at the time.

      • QHC@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think that localization would help much. Most, probably all, assets that are taking up so much storage space are not going to include language directly.

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Eh… you can have high quality assets or you can have small size, but you can’t have both.

      Game assets are typically some of the most heavily compressed assets there are (it’s often quicker, even from SSDs, to load a compressed asset and uncompress it than otherwise). There’s an entire middleware industry grown up around minimising asset sizes while keeping quality. 122 GB to me just screams “this game is fucking massive” rather than “this game is horribly unoptimised”.

  • banana_meccanica@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    Well then i hope phisical games come back to be a thing because i will never downlaod a 100gb+ game. They should make game in USB or Hardrive format that an user can buy at store like was with CD and DVD.

    • CIWS-30@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, things like this were why I thought that Blu-Ray drives would take off. It’s why I bought a Blu-ray RW drive in 2014 for my PC build because I thought it would be the future as game and media sizes would only get bigger and more of a pain to download.

      I was wrong, but I wish I hadn’t been. At least I can rip my PS3 Blu-rays to play them on emulators now. It’s hard to go back and play them at 720p on a big screen without all the features that emulators give me. Rendering at 1440p (minimum) just being the start.

      • banana_meccanica@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        Soon or later the progress will gonna need to going back as new generation of physical disk-like. Also this depency on the net is simple unsafe, service can go offline anytime and hundred of dollars in game just become nothing. We should relearning the value of owning something really in our hands and not in virtual libraries.

    • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Never? There’s that infamous quote about how people will never need more than 64KB of RAM that comes to mind. SSD prices are falling rapidly, and internet bandwidth is only increasing. I understand if you don’t have the means right this moment, but 100+ GB games are here and will only happen more often.

      • foggenbooty@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t have a problem with large games if I get the option of what I want to download. Most often these large sizes are because it forces you to get full 4K textures and multiple copies of the audio files for languages you don’t speak.

        I would bet half the size of this game is unnecessary for the average player. We really need the ability to download the core game and then these add-ons separately.

      • QHC@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Flash drives are already at that price point for consumers, let alone at manufacturing/bulk prices.

  • harpuajim@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Seems like Australia gets screwed with these types of things more than other first world nations. Even a lot of third world countries have better speeds on average than Australia. Even then though with a 50mbps connection you can just download it overnight or start it before you leave for work and you’ll be good to go.

    • syphe@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      You guys beat us at most things, but at least we have the Bledisloe, and fibre internets

  • ono@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I smell poorly compressed textures/media at resolutions much higher than most people need.

    Come on, Larian. Be better.

  • tal@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Why do people care?

    I mean, yes, all else held equal, I’d rather have a video game two days earlier or whatever, but this is way down the list of things I’d get worked up about.

    Hell, the @PatientGamers crowd waits for at least a year after release, at which point all the patches and whatnot are normally out, often sales are on, hardware to run a game tends to be cheaper, and often people have done substantial work on game wikis and the like. I can understand someone not wanting to wait for a year, but who can’t handle a day or two?

    EDIT: Or let me put another perspective on it. The release date is essentially arbitrary from a player’s standpoint. Suppose some serious bug had shown up late in development – which could easily have happened – and that release date had been pushed back by five days. I doubt that anyone would have said anything, even though they would have gotten their hands on the game several days later. But the inability to preload making that same game show up playable a couple of days later has articles being written complaining about it. Why? The delay happens either way.

  • Mandy@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    remember when devs actually tried to FUCKING COMPRESS THEIR FILES AND NOT MAKE THE GAME NEEDLESSLY MASSIVE

  • Muffi@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    So glad I just invested in a 20TB disk for this kind of shit. Got so tired of uninstalling and reinstalling games to manage space.