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The storage size of current games keeps increasing

TCKaos said:
Halo 5 is 100 GB. The last patch, which fixed two minor bugs, was over 1.3 GB

xmathuya9u4z.png


That's larger than the Heroic Map Pack, Legendary Map Pack, and the Mythic 1 Map Pack for Halo 3 combined.

For two bugs.

Also, the prerendered credits video of nothing but text scrolling over a background is 700 MB, and at least 10 GB of data in the PC version (which features only Forge) are exclusively audio files for foreign languages that are mandatory downloads for some reason (nearly 25% of the total size of the game, iirc).
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This is what gets me. I understand that higher fidelity assets require more space. However when I see these kind of updates and dozens of forced language packs It annoys the hell out of me. Microsoft is currently one of the worst offenders with storage space.

And if I didn't dislike the word lazy so much, I would've definitely used it here.
 
Game sizes increasing isn't the issue. It's natural and isn't just limited to games. As tech grows, data size will grow with it. The issue is ISPs having data/bandwidth caps in some parts of the world which is BS for the consumers.
 
Plum said:
Every thread like this has a post exactly like this that tries to make this all into some irrational double standard. A game looking good at 4K and being under 100gb aren't mutually exclusive, you can have both at the same time; developers just choose not to.
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A linear, 2 hour game with 4k assets can look good and be under 100gb easily alright. A massive open world rpg or racing game with tons of high quality models, not so much

it's not always a matter of devs "wanting or not"
 
duckroll said:
This isn't really something that is exclusive to games. It is something affects everything you use. As storage capacity costs decrease, more space is available to end users, and content providers will attempt to fill that space as quickly as possible. That just happens.

10 years ago the first iPhone released had 4gig of internal storage on the lowest end model. This was considered totally usable. Today a smartphone with 16gig of internal storage is barely usable for many people.

If storage availability increases dramatically without the additional space being utilized for in ways that wasn't possible previously, it is going to waste because it means technology isn't improving.
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Yup. I bought a 64GB iPhone this last time around (6s) because my 4s had 32GB and it was getting full near the end of its life. That 64GB is pretty much gone already and I've had it for about a year.

I also bought a 4TB external drive for both my XB1 and PS4. The XB1 is at 60% capacity. I haven't looked at my PS4 lately, but I'm kind of afraid to. I went overboard with a 2TB for Wii U.
 
I remember when my harddrive was 1 gig and I wondered how I would ever fill that up.


Then a game called Redneck Rampage came out (a humorous fps) (I wonder if it's on GoG) and it was a whole 500 megs install!!! WTF!?!?
 
Pilgrimzero said:
I remember when my harddrive was 1 gig and I wondered how I would ever fill that up.


Then a game called Redneck Rampage came out (a humorous fps) (I wonder if it's on GoG) and it was a whole 500 megs install!!! WTF!?!?
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man, Redneck Rampage was so bad that it was good. never played the expansion for it though

i had the same shock with games that came on several floppy disks as well and then CD games came out and it had like hundreds of floppy disk content inside of it??? what is this wizardry?
 
80GB currently for Modern Warfare remastered is a fucking joke. Complete laziness by the developers....and God help you if you have the edition that needs Infinite Warfare installed to launch.
 
duckroll said:
This isn't really something that is exclusive to games. It is something affects everything you use. As storage capacity costs decrease, more space is available to end users, and content providers will attempt to fill that space as quickly as possible. That just happens.

10 years ago the first iPhone released had 4gig of internal storage on the lowest end model. This was considered totally usable. Today a smartphone with 16gig of internal storage is barely usable for many people.

If storage availability increases dramatically without the additional space being utilized for in ways that wasn't possible previously, it is going to waste because it means technology isn't improving.
Click to expand...

Just because it's possible to release games without storage optimization and compression doesn't mean you should.

With storage as it is now, they could fit many more assets in the same amount of space. But the limit is now in the development time for those assets, rather than whether they can all be stored.

Edit:
What I mean to say is, we're no longer at the point where an increase in storage size would necessarily enable developers to produce higher quality assets, because developers are already creating whatever assets they want. As we can see by these huge game sizes.
 
Game sizes will keep growing as technology advances and developers add more detailed textures and models. It's nothing new. Remember back when games sizes were less than 32 MB?

Even if developers can further compress the files, HDDs are too slow for today's standards to be able to decompress all those massive files in a reasonable amount of time. Would you rather that game sizes be smaller than have shorter loading times? Most people would want better loading times.
 
I will never understand the complaints of game sizes. People want the best quality, but want it compressed too but also make sure the quality doesn't suffer, also let us pick and choose which sections of the game we want, wait if we want 4K textures we need more space? I'd hate to be a developer in today's world. It's not the fault of Sony, Microsoft or anyone that there are data caps. All of the anger should be towards ISP's
 
I remember buying the GOTY version of the Witcher 3 and being surprised that they fit the game and the expansions on the disc considering the size of each. Not only that they had some room to spare on the 50GB disc, think the size was in the low 40s. Its easy to see which devs put it in the effort and which can't be bothered.
 
TCKaos said:
Halo 5 is 100 GB. The last patch, which fixed two minor bugs, was over 1.3 GB

xmathuya9u4z.png


That's larger than the Heroic Map Pack, Legendary Map Pack, and the Mythic 1 Map Pack for Halo 3 combined.

For two bugs.

Also, the prerendered credits video of nothing but text scrolling over a background is 700 MB, and at least 10 GB of data in the PC version (which features only Forge) are exclusively audio files for foreign languages that are mandatory downloads for some reason (nearly 25% of the total size of the game, iirc).
Click to expand...

As a general Microsoft developer, this is a huge Microsoft issue. If you start a new Visual Studio project these days, it's basically automatically 2 GB. If you rely on Microsoft technology like Azure and the likes, your applications will be bloated as hell. Developing in it is really good, though, and it's not really your problem. It irks me on a level close to my core principles in life.
 
Totally agree, it's ridiculous and needs looking at. Patch sizes especially come across as completely unoptimised chunks of files being thrown out the door ASAP. I don't want to hate on Doom as it's my game of the gen but it feels like we're downloading and overwriting the entire game, literally, with the updates of that monster.
 
Games and patches get bigger and ISPs add more caps and ways to charge you for unlimited!!!!!! It's awesome!


fuck you comcast, this shit is only going to get worst for gamers
 
-hugs Switch- BOTW is what, like 13 GBs? It's not the prettiest game but they make it work for so little. Persona 5 is also only 20. Textures aren't everything.

Also, -hugs physical media-

Who wants to download 100 GB games?
 
Ryukori said:
Game sizes will keep growing as technology advances and developers add more detailed textures and models. It's nothing new. Remember back when games sizes were less than 32 MB?

Even if developers can further compress the files, HDDs are too slow for today's standards to be able to decompress all those massive files in a reasonable amount of time. Would you rather that game sizes be smaller than have shorter loading times? Most people would want better loading times.
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CPUs decompress things, but there's also compression in the way of JPG and mp3. And you have lossless compression in various ways. Anyway, it's not really as simple as shorter or longer loading times. Some times the game sizes come from having all texture resolutions included in the game. If you'd dropped the highest quality textures, you'd have cut the game size in half. If you don't use highest settings, you won't need them. I mean, in the end, all of this is down to balancing how good you want your games to look, what technology you want to utilize, how your rendering techniques require either space or CPU. Like, take audio. You can have lossless compressed audio a fraction of the size of uncompressed audio. But then you need to decode it, and that'll use CPU. If you don't have more CPU, you leave it uncompressed. Do you want to preload or stream certain assets? What parts of the hardware will bottleneck what. The list is endless. Storage tends to be cheap and not considered by developers these days. The size is an issue when you download the game, not when you're playing it. There's a reason reviews talk about games having low FPS and not that they are low in size.
 
I haven't hit my data cap yet, but games and streaming are definitely starting to push it. I never thought it would be a consideration until the last few years. I get more annoyed at the amount of time these massive patches and downloads take.
 
Still clinging to the stock 500gb drives that came with my ps4 and xb1. Every once in a while I do some tidying but for the amount of games I play it's good enough.
 
On the flip side, it was nice to see warframe's file size be reduced recently from 30+ gig to 19.

It annoys me that I have to download new maps that are part of season pass dlc's when I'm not buying the season pass. Yes battlefield, I'm looking at you.
 
fireflame said:
Another common issue for people who buy the game digitally is the downloading time needed. People with low to average internet connexions might heistate before getting the game and i have seen players refraining to get a game because of this problem.
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Buy the disc.

You should be buying physical anyway, there's no real drawback and there are plenty of benefits. That will cut down on most of the downloading.
 
Honestly it defeats the purpose of high speed internet. We need some ultra wide high def 4k shit now. In terms of time spent downloading games it reminds me of the dial-up days.
 
Merchandise said:
-hugs Switch- BOTW is what, like 13 GBs? It's not the prettiest game but they make it work for so little. Persona 5 is also only 20. Textures aren't everything.

Also, -hugs physical media-

Who wants to download 100 GB games?
Click to expand...


Most games still require you to install and DL updates.

For example, if you buy Crash Bandicoot the N sane trilogy, well i hope you intend to play them in order because right out of the box you can only play Crash 1 while the rest of the games install!
 
It's really absurd that compression isn't used more. 99.9% of people wouldn't even notice a good compression algorithm, other than the difference in size.
 
PSqueak said:
Most games still require you to install and DL updates.

For example, if you buy Crash Bandicoot the N sane trilogy, well i hope you intend to play them in order because right out of the box you can only play Crash 1 while the rest of the games install!
Click to expand...

Installing games from disc seems to go pretty quickly on my PS4. And sure, there's probably a day one patch, but it's barely a fraction of the full game size. I can wait 20 minutes to play if I have to.
 
Are people really expecting HD/4k textures, foley/audio clips/dialogue, insanely detailed character models and environments, gameplay scripts, and everything to show up in a 50kb file or something?

apparently they are...jeeebus fucking cripes
 
Why are so many people surprised that increasing resolution and adding more complex graphical effects will increase file sizes? I understand that there are bandwidth caps, slow internet services, and storage restrictions, but as time goes on file size will increase.
 
spad3 said:
Are people really expecting HD/4k textures, foley/audio clips/dialogue, insanely detailed character models and environments, gameplay scripts, and everything to show up in a 50kb file or something?

apparently they are...jeeebus fucking cripes
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I demand 4K assets be only 4kb in size.
 
Maybe there should be "budget" sizes for games. The 100 GB Halo for the Enthusiast Plus TM, and the 720p version for the casual gamer.

I play on a 20 inch 720p TV anyway, so it wouldn't really bother me.
 
disappeared said:
Still clinging to the stock 500gb drives that came with my ps4 and xb1. Every once in a while I do some tidying but for the amount of games I play it's good enough.
Click to expand...

Same here, I just uninstall games I've finished a while ago and won't be replaying. I don't feel the need to get a bigger HDD even though I have like 60 retail PS4 games or something.
 
zelas said:
How is this a "problem?" Have hard drive sizes stopped increasing?
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It's throwing money at a problem versus researching higher efficiencies. While it may not be a problem now, there could be troubles sustaining this model in the future. Plus there is always value in efficiency.
 
One thing not mentioned about compression here is that it takes time to decompress files. This means longer load times for upfront decompression and it means a hit to CPU* for decompression while streaming. I haven't done the maths so I don't know one exactly what kinds of hits we are talking about, but it's definitely a thing that could be a thing.

*IIRC both Xbox1 and ps4 have a dedicated CPU for media decompression, but I don't know the specifics of it's capabilities or how accessible it is to Devs. And I don't think it applies to assets like textures for example, more for video and audio playback.
 
Hopefully next time they put an acceptable amount of space into the launch consoles atleast it's a shame that you are kinda forced to buy a external or internal hard drive if you own lots of games and have the lauch xboxone or ps4.

Otherwise i will just skip till the more space version or revision with more space is out.

Never had to buy extra space on previous consoles. Altho i did get the ps3 way later tho (slim).
 
My least favorite part about this is ISPs like Xfinity going backwards and throwing caps at things that didn't previously have caps. Kind of fucked up when one game download is 10% of my monthly cap.
 
I've moved to a new flat recently. Unlimited fibre is out the window and I have a dongle with a monthly cap of 50GB. Even streaming a few movies or shows on Netflix and I start to quickly deplete that cap. Downloading games.. HAHAHAHAHA.

I was quite happy going mostly digital beforehand but completely off the table for the moment. The sizes are ridiculous and it would be nice if they could offer you option at the download stage. Be able to untick foreign languages for instance. To save HDD space as well as bandwidth.
 
I knew this was going to be a bigger issue back when I hacked my PS3 and made backups of games. It's crazy how much space some games take up with multiple languages, or 3D video files.

I applaud some of the Call of Duty games I have on Steam for separating SP and MP (and even Zombies I think) into different install options.

At minimum, consoles should allow for MP/SP only downloads, or detect system language and offer other languages as an option to download later.
 
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