For example, both Final Fantasy XVI & STALKER 2 take up 152GB & 165GB on my 2TB external SSD. I mean, why are steam games HUGE as f*ck regarding their file sizes lately? Don’t even mention CoD (200GB?!), even with the fastest internet connection: you can’t bypass patience as these things take up time. For me, it took me about 2 days to finish (pause & resume download). I’ve finished installing KCD II (Royal Edition) and that was 85GB (took up 8-12 hours with fast internet, I was binge watching a TV show on Prime Video the entire time).
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Cheap storage and RAM availability (until recently) meant that developers could sacrifice space and minimize the amount of compression on assets.
Decompressing files require processing, and if you can avoid that, then you free up some computer resources.
4K textures are a scam. With upscaling, even the people who run games in 4K don’t use the 4K textures.
I don’t think you know what the word scam means
For a very simple element, consider that if you used to have texture resolutions of 256² = 65536 pixels, you now might easily have 4096² = ~16.7mil pixels, a 25480% increase.
So our 4k texture packs really guzzle up harddrive space. And that’s ignoring how many many many more things there are to texture in the first place, how each element has multiple textures overlaid for shading, and all the other parts also needing more space like higher-def audio.
I figured it had to be something like 4k texture packs. I have a Steam Deck and don’t generally play anything at high res even when connected to a monitor. There ought to be a way to say hey limit the install to the res I’ll actually be using?
I’ve seen a couple games that have the high res textures as a free separate download. That’d be nice. I’m not playing in 4k so I don’t need all that extra crap.
Lack of optimization, and crazy texture packs
Audio is another big one. If you want good quality music and your game is voice acted you would be surprised how much space all those audio files take. Add in tons of other gigabytes if you offer voice acting for other languages.
They optimized for things other than install size. Optimization is often choosing one thing at the expense of others.
they optimized for least effort.
When time is money, optimizing for time is a worthwhile endeavor. 6+ year dev cycles aren’t something anyone wants. But realistically, large file sizes probably aren’t going away with more dev time.
And a huge number of art assets in general. These days in the AAA industry the artists work much faster than the designers and programmers, so by the time the designers and programmers have finished their part, the art team has had time to make 3-4 times as many assets as they really need.
Various things:
- uncompressed audio (perhaps needlessly, for lower-end CPUs)
- pre-rendered cutscenes, multiple resolutions
- large texture sizes (also think normal maps etc), multiple resolutions
- redundant or unused data
- large model sizes, or more assets in general
- previous issues may be multiplied by multi-language support
I would also say it could be a problem of art direction, having no constraint and ignoring smart techniques that use less data.
Also, a higher-budget --> more preorders?
More data --> more game?Storage and computing power was pretty cheap until recently, so it’s just “wasted” time and money to optimize games. I think in the coming years games will be optimized more since everything is becoming so expensive.
Back in the nineties, I advocated for “build on the most powerful system, test and improve on the least”.
I think it’s still relevant.
The idea of course is as developers, we need the best equipment to make the work bearable and more efficient, but the users rarely have that luxury. Make it work well on the least powerful reasonably representative equipment.
It’s easy to think your work is done on the dev box, but have a disaster in the real world.
I admire your optimism. I hope it is so.
Bruh it’s literally how tech advances…
When resources (compute power) is cheap, there’s huge leaps in tech. When resources are scarce, the fat gets trimmed.
It’s not optimism, it’s pattern recognition.
when have we seen gaming resources become more scarce?
As others have said, it’s mostly audio and textures, with some of it being the choice of engine. Lossless CD quality audio and ultra high resolution textures and bump maps for a jillion triangle models take up a lot of space. The actual executables are relatively small, though certainly the layers and layers of frameworks that make up modern software development are somewhat to blame.
So it sounds like its an exchange of size for customizability.
If you had a different installer for each language and/or video quality, then each installation could be much smaller. But since we (gamers) want to be able to change texture quality “on the fly” via the settings menu, we have to deal with all the possible textures coming in the game files.
Does that sound like I have it right?
That is definitely part of it, but there’s also just plain more textures and models because people complain if they see the same texture or models reused a lot, and they want ever increasing visual quality. An uncompressed 256x256 RGBA texture takes 256 kilobytes to store. A 4k version takes 16 megabytes.
Equal parts textures and arranging duplicate data next to each other for fast streaming
The duplicate data isn’t necessary anymore when installed on SSDs but a bunch of games still have it.
Helldivers 2 on PC as an example went from a bloated 150+ GB install down to less than 40 GB at some point when they found out that the duplication both wasn’t helpful for the vast majority of PC players and it didn’t have the impact it used to. Now it is comparable to the console install, which was always smaller.
It’s like the Trojan war. A gifted horse has lots of other shit inside that you don’t know about.
It costs time and money to make them smaller, big studios dont want to waste that and know their games will sell regardless.
You can bypass it by not buying such large games. Plenty of good games under 5GB come out all the time.
I had some amazing deck builders come in at less than 1GB.
I’d say this year’s best game so far, that I’ve played anyway, is only 2.13 GB; Escape from Ever After.
Try to run any 3d modelling software and create something trivial, like a textured cube. Measure the size.
Historically fames have had to be shipped on storage devices and storage was very heavy until late 80s ish so optimise to get your stuff small. These days you can download 100 gig in hours so they don’t bother. Look up old drives they’re huge.
These days you can download 100 gig in hours
Well yes, but for some of us the ‘in hours’ is more than 24-hours worth of hours. Longer in reality, because it’s shared internet.
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No, Call of duty doesn’t even store all of its full res textures on your hard drive lol. They could make it much bigger if they wanted to
I don’t follow this logic. Could you expand on it?
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They likely mean that if a game is just a few GB in size, people won’t think twice about uninstalling it since they can just quickly download it again if needed.
By making the download bigger and so the installation time longer, it disincentivizes players to do that.
Gotcha, I hadn’t considered that angle. When I’m in need of space, the largest one I’m not really playing is usually the first to go (e.g. Helldivers). Then once or is uninstalled, the large size is my disincentive to install it again.
What makes an install sticky for me is something like mods or customizations that I would have to set up again after a reinstall… which are much more prevalent in single player offline games than monetized live service chum.
It’s flawed
Devs don’t compress textures because it’s slower and that’s what kids care about.
It’s not about time to install, it’s shaving off every microsecond of loading time.
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Do you know them because your dad works at Nintendo or thru your Canadian gf?
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Cool, don’t want to distract you from being a race car driver tho
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