I recently bought the 2021 remaster of a strategy game from 2004 and it was almost 50 GB. Add another 12 GB if for some reason you want the 4k textures on models from 2004. This game used to come on a CD.
4k and 8k textures are huge. Upscaling the textures takes a lot of extra space surprisingly. That's usually the single biggest thing bloating a games size.
The crazy thing is that a lot of today’s models are actually much more simple than they used to be. Look at comparisons for old games like Mario Galaxy versus Mario Odyssey for good examples. But this is done because it allows for more detailed environments; The lack of polygons means that (as long as the textures can be loaded fast enough) your rendering goes much faster. You’re not being bottlenecked by polygon counts anymore, because there are fewer polygons.
But this has caused texture sizes to balloon, because now you’re shifting nearly all the heavy lifting over to those textures instead of the polygons.
To be clear, the 4k textures are an optional free extra download that bumps the install size up significantly above the ~50GB. The 1024x1024 textures that come with it as standard will still have taken up a good chunk extra over 2004's version though, of course
I've dug around in the files a little bit for modding purposes and as far as I can tell, one of the biggest reasons for bloat is the way that they implemented an ethnicity system in the remaster. In the original, units just had a skin colour that was roughly appropriate for the historical home region of the faction they're from. In the remaster, they added a system that gives the units some variety in appearance that takes in to account where the unit was recruited; if you recruit soldiers in England, they'll be paler on average than the ones recruited in Algeria. However, it seems like the way this was implemented was to give every single unit a unique texture for every ethnicity. There's no common set of, say, five-ten faces for southern European men, for example. Every single unit has one southern European face, one northern European face, one north African face etc etc. Same goes for the visible skin on the rest of the body. Multiply that across about a thousand different units and suddenly you've got an utterly absurd number of nearly identical textures. And since this a strategy game, players are basically never looking at any of them at a level of zoom that affords each unit more than a few dozen pixels.
I think people also have an odd idea of what it takes to photorealistically depict a fucking stadium full of people and players with realtime reflections and sweating normal maps. The texture info alone is gonna be huge, but likewise there are tons of high res models animating in realtime all over the screen. So yeah, this being a gigantic install makes sense if 4k res gaming is what people want to play.
Audio is also huge for most games. Especially if the game has a lot of dialogue and offers several languages. AAA, dialogue heavy games can have hundreds of hours of audio for a single language.
Yeah, I feel like the improvements in gaming hardware have gone 50% to improving dynamic systems and graphics, and 50% to messy project bloat. Not to mention the constant crunch culture means they never have time to clean things up before launch, and after launch is for game breaking bugs and DLC.
Do they not even use compression anymore? I've been wondering since Steam came out if I was downloading compressed game files or wasting bandwidth every time. They used to try to conserve storage, compressing everything to fit on one or two discs (or floppy disks before that)
If you watch the download graph, the blue bars is what you're downloading, and is always significantly smaller than the green line which is what is being saved to disk.
A version of the White Man Has Been Here meme showing a Robert Griffing painting of two Native American trackers examining footprints in the snow. One is standing and the other squatting, both are holding rifles. The squatting tracker is saying "western game dev has been here."
His standing companion asks "How can you tell?"
The first tracker replies, "161 GB for a basketball game".
The footprints in the snow have been replaced by a screen shot of an X/Twitter notification by Saved You A Click Video Games replying to a post by GameSpot reading "NBA 2K24 File Size Revealed, And It's Even Bigger Than Starfield - Report dlvr.it/Svvggh2" accompanied by an image of a basketball player for the Lakers team. The Saved You A Click Video Games' response reads "It's 161GB on Xbox Series X|S."
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The first computer I ever used didn't have a hard drive (Macintosh 128k). The first hand me down computer I had in my room was a 286 with a 500mb HDD.
I vaguely remember that one evening my father drilled into me that if I get a dialogue box with the text [Disk Read Error, (Abort) (Retry) (Initialize)?] That Initialize was never the correct option. Apparently I deleted one of his projects by mistake. I was 5 or 6 at the time
My buddy's first HDD for his Amiga held 20mb. It was the size of a toaster, and cost something like $400. Now, a chip the size of my fingernail can hold a terabyte, and costs less than that HDD. I know it's slowed down a lot, but I really wonder where we'll be in another forty years.
My first computer was a Coleco/ADAM with a tape drive.
My first "IBM Compatible" computer was a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive. It also had a CD-ROM which at the time was this whole huge futuristic thing. We had an entire encyclopedia on a CD! They could hold hundreds of megabytes! More storage than I could ever need!
I have a camera drone with a 128 gigabyte micro SD card in it. The card is smaller than my fingernail. I freely admit that having that much storage on something so small just doesn't add up in my brain. I know its possible, it works, I'm just someone who grew up dealing with megabytes being something that took up a lot of physical space and now something a few orders of magnitude larger could get lost in my pocket.
The uncompressed sizes make for a much faster install. Repackers like FitGirl compress the duck out of the game files to make the download smaller but it takes ages to install the games afterwards.
Compression, rendering and other algorithms that use the processing power of the console rather than then entire ssd storage. This 161gb is so incredibly lazy
From the games I've seen, all of them have used compressed textures. It's the industry norm my dude. I don't think I have ever seen an uncompressed dds in the wild
I agree with this. I think the real problem is that people have been complaining about this for years and Sony and Microsoft still do nothing about even tho they sell consoles meant for gaming. At least add transparent compression to the filesystem. Have more storage for games right off the bat instead of selling 500GB models and calling it a day.
Something that i liked very much on some games was choosing the assets you want to download, you want to play on low, no need to download ultra high res textures.
The thing is, using less resources is always an optimization cost for the company. If the user will just get better hardware, there's not much incentive for spending on that. Unless the company aims for devices with lower hardware like switch, deck or mobile.
I'd say around 98% of players don't want to choose between texture sizes. Plug and play is by far the most convenient, especially on these sports games. Seriously, think of someone who legit plays nba games, do they really care?
Second of all, graphical fidelity is the only thing keeping these games afloat. There is not much untapped innovation when it comes to sports games. They HAVE to make graphics better per gen to justify 80$ pricetag or whatever these games go for.
I think the solution to game size (aside from optimization) is breaking up the game into optional downloads. Things like, 4k textures, high poly models, multiplayer, singleplayer etc.
This would be a great feature. However some of that has shared resources. SP and MP probably use 85% same stuff. Have seen UHD Textures as a separate download in some games.
Or maybe I don't want to spend over 100$ for an SSD that can store more than 7 games, or leave my computer on for 24 hours to download the fucking thing.