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Middle Earth: Shadow of War has a ~60GB download on PC

Alexander DeLarge

Alexander DeLarge

Member
DLer5_9VAAAE_Rz.jpg:large

https://twitter.com/DanStapleton/status/916390593340751872

Uncompressed audio/video files strike again. This may not even include high resolution textures which were an optional free DLC last time. It's ridiculous, especially when you consider that a ton of people will be playing on SSDs and have ISP bandwidth caps. Can developers please stop doing this?

Render cutscenes in engine. Stop bloating games unnecessarily. Also, we don't need our sound files in FLAC. Just saying.

63.93GB on PS4 Pro too.
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Edit: Denuvo confirmed 30 hours prior to release. It'll be entertaining to see how much better the pirated version will be compared to the product people pay for. The inevitable repacks that pirates download will probably bring it down to less than half the size like they did with Nier Automata (48GB to 23GB). The loot boxes (necessary for the the ending) will likely be bypassed and the DRM will be bypassed within a couple hours while paying customers will be stuck with it for years.

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A

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
This game is just the personification of everything that is wrong with 2017 AAA gaming.
 
SJRB

SJRB

Gold Member
Pretty sure rendering cutscenes in-engine requires a bit more than a flick of a switch.

I agree that the file size is massive, but let's not get silly.
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Sentenza said:
Honestly? If it can't be done, just put simpler cutscenes in your game, or just less of them.
Because fuck it if I care about wasting 50 GB in shitty cinematics.
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"Artists, just make less good impressive work!"
 
Self_Destructive

Self_Destructive

Member
I absolutely agree 100% devs should stop with the pre-rendered stuff whenever possible. I'd honestly rather have a bit longer load screens and have a uniform consistent looking game.

That said, if games are targeting 4K, and are pre-rendering their videos at that resolution, I'm honestly quite ok with the file sizes becoming what they are. Of course I say that as someone with no cap and pretty fast internet. The ideal solution would be giving us the option to download high quality video files or not.

That said, hopefully this means the end of crappy looking pre-rendered video on PC games with ugly macro blocking and visuals that are 900p/1080p.
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Sentenza said:
Yes.
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You don't see how ridiculous that sounds? If anything, I bet this game has the standard 1 hr and 30 minute give or take cutscene run time. So it's not like they're making too many cutscenes. It's the lack of compression.
 
L

low-G

Member
On consoles, have an option to not install videos to the HDD and instead stream off the disk ala classic PC CD games.

On PC, have an option for low quality cinematics that take up less space.

Sometimes a game doesn't need the cinematics at all. Take Tekken 7, MANY GB of videos that are basically YouTube videos (the history of Tekken). Doesn't need to be a mandatory install, anyways.

MS's Quantum Break streaming videos may be an option when bandwidth caps are less pressing than storage space.

I think the real time cinematics is probably asking too much of many devs.
 
Z

ZeroX03

Banned
Sentenza said:
Honestly? If it can't be done, just put simpler cutscenes in your game, or just less of them.
Because fuck it if I care about wasting 50 GB in shitty cinematics.
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Fuck if I care about you wasting 50GB if it means me getting less content.

What kind of silly logic is that?

low-G said:
On consoles, have an option to not install videos to the HDD and instead stream off the disk ala classic PC CD games.

On PC, have an option for low quality cinematics that take up less space.

Sometimes a game doesn't need the cinematics at all. Take Tekken 7, MANY GB of videos that are basically YouTube videos (the history of Tekken). Doesn't need to be a mandatory install, anyways.

MS's Quantum Break streaming videos may be an option when bandwidth caps are less pressing than storage space.

I think the real time cinematics is probably asking too much of many devs.
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afaik, anything on disc is a mandatory install (on PS4). Everything gets transferred over. They could do like 720p video and have optional higher res download/stream options potentially.
 
L

low-G

Member
ZeroX03 said:
Fuck if I care about you wasting 50GB if it means me getting less content.

What kind of silly logic is that?
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They should save the videos as uncompressed 16k just for you (of course use the compressed current video as a source). Enjoy your 'content'
 
Sentenza

Sentenza

Member
ZeroX03 said:
Fuck if I care about you wasting 50GB if it means me getting less content.

What kind of silly logic is that?
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Where did I give you the impression it was intended as a poll to reach an agreement?
It was a statement. Feel free to disagree, as I feel free to not give a damn about it.
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Sentenza said:
The only ridiculous thing is your oversimplification.
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That's literally what you were saying devs should do.


Then that's what they should address? The bottom line doesn't change: it's simply not worth it.
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Yes they should just click the magical button that makes higher quality video file sizes less huge without sacrificing fidelity. For many consumers compressed cutscenes are absolutely jarring when they're playing at higher resolutions. I'm guessing a lot of the game's cutscenes are around this length. That's short, but when it's uncompressed it's a much large video file.
 
Z

ZeroX03

Banned
low-G said:
They should save the videos as uncompressed 16k just for you (of course use the compressed current video as a source). Enjoy your 'content'
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I was giving a facetious response to a clearly unreasonable post.

Sentenza said:
Where did I give you the impression it was intended as a poll to reach an agreement?
It was a statement. Feel free to disagree, as I feel free to not give a damn about it.
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You're not worth engaging with, you've certainly made that clear.
 
G

guybrushfreeman

Unconfirmed Member
Steam could build in a picker when you go to install. They already have different depots for different languages (ie only the languages you need is installed if the developer sets it that way). Perhaps going forward developers could compartmentalise high and low quality assets (for video files this should be fairly easy at least).

Then, when the user clicks install they can get a choice of which assets to download and an idea of the files size of each.

Any extra work is extra testing though (it's simple but things go wrong with simple things all the time).

However, at this point it does seem like download sizes are so large many customers would likely never purchase the game. In fact I'm kind of surprised publishers would want to turn away customers like this and didn't just force the file size down out of fear of losing sales.
 
J

jrcbandit

Member
Damn, I don't think I can get a refund anymore since I used up the key at GMG and redeemed on Steam. That's 10% of my monthly bandwidth for 1 freaking game and neither of my SSDs have 100 GB free FFS. Use good compression techniques and don't have gigantic sized pre-rendered cutscenes. PC game graphics from 2010 era versus now aren't 10-20x better, yet take up 10-20x the disk space.
 
Sentenza

Sentenza

Member
jrcbandit said:
PC game graphics from 2010 era versus now aren't 10-20x better, yet take up 10-20x the disk space.
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It's not a matter of looking better.
Video files, as textures, tend to increase in size geometrically as their resolution increases.

The problem with this is: they become gigantic far quicker than they become noticeably better to look at.
Which is why the counter-argument "Waaah, you are chastising artists for giving their best" is extremely silly.

I'll take an in-engine cutscene that sacrifices some degree of detail (while usually looking almost equally impressive, if not even remarkably smoother thank to support for arbitrary framerate on PC) over a a pre-rendered FMV that takes easily up to 10-20 times as much in disk size (and it's typically blurry as shit anyway).

Giolon said:
Unacceptable. Bandwidth caps are real.
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I have a fairly fast internet (100Mb/s optic fiber) and no bandwidth or data cap.
SSD space still doesn't come for free.
 
C

CHC

Member
This really just does come across as careless and obnoxious.

Compress stuff. It's not that big a fucking deal.
 
F

FF Seraphim

Member
1/10 of my SSD? No thank you. Was on the fence on picking this up but the hell is up with such big ass files? Is it this big of a file on consoles?
 
Coreda

Coreda

Member
If the size is indeed due to pre-rendered cutscenes the only people I really can understand not minding them are those playing at 1080p or below. Nier Automata's cutscenes took most of the space and looked awful at higher resolutions, frankly. On the other hand the game didn't look like it would be pull off such cutscenes in-game. For a mid-tier production I can give it a pass though, but there are games that can handle in-game cutscenes well.
 
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