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Compression is dead, ladies and gentlemen.

Who the fuck cares about 100gb games when storage is so cheap these days? Just install one or two other games if it's such a big deal. I'm sure you have single player games you haven't touched in months just sitting on your hard drive.

Better yet, just buy more storage space. It's cheap.
 
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Freeza93

Banned
if elden ring doesn't look good graphically what does that make redfall? atari 2600 visuals?
Elden Ring looks like a early ps4 game with high res and simply higher settings. The Art is what makes it look great and bosses look good too but the world itself and textures are very outdated yes.
 

T4keD0wN

Member
Meanwhile a mediocre looking game like Redfall which is SURE to launch with 1/4 the content of Left 4 Dead 2
Ok, how you know? Perhaps it has a lot high resolution microtransactions skins, those take up space :messenger_beaming:
Not being a fan stylized visuals doesnt mean it looks bad, the screenshots youve shown certainly didnt help your own argument.
Dont worry, just check the recommended specs instead of the minimum ones, they are very light on storage. Its not like you wont have the option to play the cloud and maybe geforce now version if youre bothered it taking up space....
187xECp.png
 

coffinbirth

Member
So, someone on twitter just posted the system requirements for Redfall and... well, just take a look at this retardation.
FnWWETBXoBgKRWQ.jpg


It's the typical unoptimized PC port that we're going to be seeing a lot of in 2023, mid range minimum requirements, insane ram requirement, etc... but look at the storage space.

100 gigabytes.

100 gigabytes

One hundred fucking gigabytes.

For a game, which looks like this

ss_85c9ccbe89ebbae9c2ec8333b7a896c1574dccf0.1920x1080.jpg


ss_d3a513ced278f97bda953765164fd01dedafd3cd.1920x1080.jpg

For reference, Hi-Fi Rush, a game which came out today under the same publisher, only requires 20 gigabytes of storage... Its recommended requirements are weaker than Redfall's minimum.
and that's for a game which looks like THIS.


ss_7dfaee4616fbed65b2b0fcb82d55dc0a957fd8a5.1920x1080.jpg

ss_8a13650ffe930da77593dae80f0118588c46a5ca.1920x1080.jpg


So guys.... what the hell happened? Why the hell is ONE game so clearly inferior looking and larger than the other?

Remember when games used to be 400 megabytes, 2 gigabytes, 4 MEGABYTES?
Stored on the 512 kilobyte cartridge of Mario World was one of the most fun gaming experiences I've had.
Super Mario 64 didn't exceed 8 megabytes.
Castlevania Symphony of the Night was a 700 megabyte game on the Playstation 1.

When we made the switch to gigabytes with 6th gen, it was a conservative usage. Most games on the PS2 were just 4 gigs, with the exception of God of War, God of War 2, and Gran Turismo 4. And if you've played those 3 titles you know exactly why they're 8 gigs.

Even if we're talking 100 gigabytes, Grand Theft Auto 5 is 100 gigabytes and that game has 100 times the content Redfall will launch with. I know this for a fact because of the state of MS's Studios and Modern gaming as a whole.

Destiny 2 is 100 gigabytes and that game has 6 years of content updates and expansions behind it. It's also an MMO, so it's excused on that. Finally, it looks like this.
Destiny+2+Screenshot+2017.10.24+-+20.58.40.80.jpg

Forza Horizon 5 has some of the prettiest racing game graphics I've ever seen and 600 + cars behind it as well as a gigantic open world and many things to do inside of it. And it's also a looker

Forza-Horizon-5-1-1.jpg

Meanwhile a mediocre looking game like Redfall which is SURE to launch with 1/4 the content of Left 4 Dead 2, sporting graphics that look like they came straight out of 2015. 100 gigabytes, please!

Compression is dead ladies and gentlemen. Better save up and buy those 10tb hard drives because you'll need them for the coming years!
EVERYTHING IS COMPRESSED...more so now than ever. It's just the assets are exponentially larger than they used to be.

Using Arkane as an example, their last two games, Prey and Deathloop were roughly 40GB. That's less than a Blu Ray movie of data. Not crazy that games with lots of high quality audio and video assets to match or surpass that, considering none of these games play out in under two hours.
Redfall is supposedly much, much larger than Prey, both in terms of map size, but also in scope... i.e. DATA. Audio for 4x characters, tons of npc audio, etc...that shit takes up space if you want quality and not compressed to the point of sounding/looking like ass.

"With Redfall, however, the developer is going fully open-world and creating its first truly seamless locale, and with that increase in scale comes an increase in map size. So much so that just one small part of Redfall's map is bigger than the entirety of Talos 1, the spaceship that serves as the setting for Arkane’s 2017 Prey reboot."

Sounds like a BIG game. 100GB big? Maybe. Certainly not 20GB. There is a post in this thread asking if anyone would notice the difference between a 100GB Redfall and a 20GB one, and you have to laugh. To compress shit down that far, you'd certainly notice. The games art style isn't going for realism, so it's 2015 graphics quality? This is just silly. You know there were 50+GB games on PS3, right?

Comparing it to simplistic bullshit rhythm games that would look at home on PS3 is capital R-etarded. But I expect nothing less from someone that didn't require a 10TB+ HDD LAST GEN, let alone has to "save up" for one...or whine about min specs that target 5 year old tech, smh.


Ever since red book audio entered the scene, game sizes increased by orders of magnitude. Eventually visual fidelity followed suit, and now you have AAA games with TONS of HQ assets for games that take a hundred years to see every nook and cranny in. Hardly the same as the 8-bit days.

Nintendo are the masters of keeping game sizes down, and even BotW, a game with pretty low quality assets, tips towards 15GB. Luigi's Mansion is about 7GB...that's larger than GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas for PS2 COMBINED. Think about that. BotW is more than DOUBLE that.
Other side of that coin are bloated games, usually AAA in nature that fall back on the storage medium that hits retail. If it fits on disc, that's all that matters. Fighting and sports games are notorious for this.



As someone that's worked with compression libraries for years, and having to bury multi-region audio in releases because the CFL calls won't work properly unpacked/can't be unpacked server-side, I can assure you that compression is keeping these games in check, as crazy as that sounds.
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
I guess I don’t see it as an issue for me. I don’t have a problem deleting games I’m not playing. My download speeds are fantastic, so it’s not like I have to wait hours to play something.
 

coffinbirth

Member
Yup. Master Chief Collection used to drop 30GB+ patches on a regular basis. Storage space is a secondary concern to data caps.
Ironically, it is because of the extremely efficient compression method. That's because you have to replace an entire compression archive, not just the code and/or individual files. This is great for cramming all of your data into the smallest space possible, but extremely inefficient when you need to replace portions of it.
 

Knightime_X

Member
Pray 8k textures never happen.
100gb will seem tiny in comparison.

Maybe one day they can have multiple versions or options for different texture resolutions which will GREATLY affect storage size.
 

coffinbirth

Member
Developers did start encoding audio in FLAC rather than using a compressed format like OGG/HE-ACC, that could have a effect when you take into account the different languages of dialog.
FLAC is "lossless" compression...but yes, it makes a massive difference.
 

Corndog

Banned
yes i could clear out more space on my machine and buy a new SSD but why the fuck should i have to when the game clearly looks dated? many developers have done far more with 100 gb of space and i'd happily buy an SSD for games like those. Hell i even did a whole purge on installed games from my system storage a couple days ago, i can easily fit this on my machine

but there's no reason this game should be taking up as much storage as it is. it should be 50 gigabytes at most with those visuals
Are you a developer?
 

Robb

Gold Member
Feels like this has been the case for quite some time. Isn’t CoD also something ridiculous like 130GB every year?
 

Hugare

Member
It's one of the things I truly hate and have hated since Carmack's Megatextures kick.
We have to get back to optimized experiences.

Not a single person would notice the difference between a 100GB redfall and a 20GB redfall.

Breath of the Wild is an impossibly big game and is sub 15GB.
Tsushima takes up 35GB.

Devs can and should do better in a world where +100GB SSD space isn't cheap, especially in the console space.
BotW and GoT reused assets over and over again.

Those games are made of trees, rocks, and one wood cabin here and there. One of the reasons why loading in GoT was so fast: they had some very low quantity of different assets to load in.

During the stream Arkane mentioned that each room was handcrafted. That means quite possibly unique assets, which increase the game size.

Then you add 4K textures, voice acting for many different languages and etc.

Each game is built different. The comparisons made by the OP are like apples to oranges.

A game like AC Unity, for example, is huge due to baked lighting data. Almost 50gb just for lighting.

Also content ≠ amount of data. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

Minecraft is infinite and it's less than 1 gb. No Mans Sky is also infinite, and its 15 gb in size.

I know your intentions were good OP, but your post was very ignorant.
 
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Jigsaah

Gold Member
Redfall actually looks really high quality in my opinion. People seem to confuse art style with what is graphically taxing. You can tell from the lighting, the animations, amount of enemies on screen, the textures, etc., that this game is not the easiest thing to run. Comparing it to Hi FI Rush is not even close to fair.
 

Corndog

Banned
BotW and GoT reused assets over and over again.

Those games are made of trees, rocks, and one wood cabin here and there. One of the reasons why loading in GoT was so fast: they had some very low quantity of different assets to load in.

During the stream Arkane mentioned that each room was handcrafted. That means quite possibly unique assets, which increase the game size.

Then you add 4K textures, voice acting for many different languages and etc.

Each game is built different. The comparisons made by the OP are like apples to oranges.

A game like AC Unity, for example, is huge due to baked lighting data. Almost 50gb just for lighting.

Also content ≠ amount of data. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

Minecraft is infinite and it's less than 1 gb. No Mans Sky is also infinite, and its 15 gb in size.

I know your intentions were good OP, but your post was very ignorant.
One of my least concerns when buying a game is how big it is. At worst it means I have to shuffle old games onto a regular hard drive.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Games have been 100gb for 10 years. Nobody cares. Just but a bigger sad. You don’t need 17 games installed at once.
If anything, games should be 500gb considering how fast game size was rising up until ps4
 

baphomet

Member
You talk like this to people on the street? I doubt it.

I've played it. 4 hours. Soulless, empty open world that would look out of place on PlayStation Vita. A handheld released over a decade ago.

wow, 4 whole hours.

So you may have seen 7-8% of the world.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Bro, forspoken is like 120gb on PC and needs 150 and just look at it compared to redfall.

Both redfall and forspoken are large open world games. What's horizon forbidden west on ps5? Probs like 90gb...yeah, maybe the assets are so large on these games they would be 200gb?

Your comparing level based/area based games with huge open world games.
 

MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
wow, 4 whole hours.

So you may have seen 7-8% of the world.

It's a 20 hour game top and that's with side content. So I'm 1/5 done.

Bro, forspoken is like 120gb on PC and needs 150 and just look at it compared to redfall.

Both redfall and forspoken are large open world games. What's horizon forbidden west on ps5? Probs like 90gb...yeah, maybe the assets are so large on these games they would be 200gb?

Your comparing level based/area based games with huge open world games.

Exactly.
 

Rhazkul

Member
Publishers should let the players decide which versions they wanna download and play. A 1080p texture pack will be a lot smaller than a 4K texture pack. A lot of people don't need 4K textures - and this makes up a lot of space. Same with Audio - i don't need High Definition Audio. If you are an enthusiast, fine, i get it. But a lot gamers aren't and don't need all that high end stuff. These games could be easily 30-50% smaller if texture resolutions would be customizable pre-installing.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Op has no idea what redfall is and makes a thread comparing it to left 4 dead 2 becuase it has 4 player co op.....claims it to have one quarter the content.....

....never fail gaf....hahahah
 
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MidGenRefresh

*Refreshes biennially
It's 15-20 hours for only the main story.

Obviously you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

Lol, so what are you suggesting? That side quests are taking place in completely different areas? What difference does it make? Game is short for an open world adventure, period. It's not big. It's not detailed.

Also, try washing your dirty mouth next time you're close to water source.

110gb of bracelet audio.

No way. I "only" played for 4 hours (which is 20% of the game, like it or not) and I'm hearing the same banter over and over and over and over and over again.
 

Thebonehead

Banned
No way. I "only" played for 4 hours (which is 20% of the game, like it or not) and I'm hearing the same banter over and over and over and over and over again.
Stick Around Bob Ross GIF by Originals


I was being facetious by implying the budget went on the audio.

Although saying that, it may have multi lingual audio files which always bump up the size.
 

mrmeh

Member
I used to work for a company in video game delivery which recompressed games and then unpacked them. Many texture assets are duplicated or even more due to the slow non sequential read speed of Hard disk drives, this is not an issue on SSD's which do not have to physically move a tiny arm to another part of the disk.

This means that if a developer, publisher wants the game to work on HDD they have to bundle textures together in level/area packs and as you can imagine many many textures will appear in every bundle.

So large size is not necessarily down to bad compression, pretty much all games are compressed, its more down to the structure and texture demands of the game.

The savings for only supporting SSD and including the texture once are generally massive and much more than switching to a slightly better form of compression.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
Microsoft really does a number on people on here. Like the slightest good news or even just news about games in general sends people into crazy town and they have to make threads about anything they can.

I think you need to give more examples op and tell us how you really feel about Microsoft games.
 

Braag

Member
I could be wrong but doesn't a large install size usually mean the game has a lot of unique assets? I mean Deathloop is like 30gb and that game's world is quite small and reuses a lot of assets in each map.
 

AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
But we have literally no idea how big it is. It could be absolutely massive and those 100gb are being put to good use on unique textures, sounds etc. to each zone.

I think people just need to learn that they don't need every game installed at once. I've never had a C:\ drive bigger than 1tb and I've never needed it. How many people are honestly playing through that many huge games simultaneously?

Of course I do tend to forget that a lot of Americans have data caps on their internet usage which is absolutely wild to me. Suppose that can be a big factor.
 
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LRKD

Member
There def seems to be some poor arguments in this thread. A lot of people seem to think games have to be bigger now and yes in a way that is true. Better graphics and larger scoped games are going to be larger in file size, but you can still compress and optimize the size of the files, without losing any of the scope of modern games.

The reason compression is dead is really simple. It's because in previous generations, devs HAD to compress games to fit the size of cds, and cartridges, now they are no longer limited to the size of a cartridge, cd or Blu-ray disc. If they go over, they can always have users download whatever data they need onto their device later. No need to waste time or energy trying to get every piece of data to fit under x amount now.

Games could still look the exact same, but have better optimization and compression of files, we don't have to have our cake, or eat it. This isn't the either-or situation some people are trying to make it be. It's just devs no longer having to do something, so they simple choose not to at the players expense.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
But we have literally no idea how big it is. It could be absolutely massive and those 100gb are being put to good use on unique textures, sounds etc. to each zone.

I think people just need to learn that they don't need every game installed at once. I've never had a C:\ drive bigger than 1tb and I've never needed it. How many people are honestly playing through that many huge games simultaneously?

Of course I do tend to forget that a lot of Americans have data caps on their internet usage which is absolutely wild to me. Suppose that can be a big factor.

Exactly, imagine commenting on a game that's not released yet and thinking it's got 1 / 4 the content of left 4 dead. A linear level based shooter that had 5 acts even it launched that took about 15 to 30 minutes to complete an act....
 
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