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.
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.
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 mean I can understand how textures add up but 161 gigs for a basketball game seems like a lot of unoptimized stuff going on
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)
Is this forreal
It’s because they just Ctrl+X last year’s game directory but didn’t put it back in a .ZIP file.
Y’all wanted 4K Next Gen Gwaphix well that shits gonna cost you some storage space lol
Sucks but whatever. Been happening since the beginning.
Cyberpunk is like 70GB
And Starfield is more than twice that. It’s ridiculous.
There’s no reason for it.Do you have like solid number of reasonable gigabytes a game can be? How did you arrive to this number exactly?
You don’t uNdERstAnD, a game must be less than 1GB in size or it’s unOpTiMiZeD.
But at the same time, man I’m sick of these last gen/old non raytracing cards are holding us back! Where are my rig melting next gen games?!?! Oh wait I have to download 100GB and still turn down settings to High!?!? unOpTiMiZeD!! furiously leaves bad steam review
i want good graphics
NO FILLING THE HARDDRIVE, only good graphics😡😡
Jesus christ what a braindead thread this is. Evil devs just filling your games with bytes just to piss you off right
Compression is a thing. But software developers offload their laziness on their users.
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
It would mean slower loading perhaps but there’s a balance to be struck there. Besides, game being fun has nothing to do with game being high fidelity or huge hard disk space.
Not just slower loading. Less available performance in game.
Every time it needs to load a texture it’s uncompressing it on the fly…. That’s going to take away from CPU and RAM (both the compressed and uncompressed versions will be in RAM).
It’s not going to be less performance in the game. Once uploaded to GPU texture is ready to be used. Just the loading part would be slower.
Christ you people will bitch about anything. You all just want to be pissed off.
Bro all I’ve seen you doing is bitch about everyone bitching about everything.
Yes. Bitching about your bitching. It’s gone full circle.
You stick around though, and continue to bitch. I don’t know which is worse, tbh. You are aware of the bitching that takes place here and yet you continue to return…and bitch. So my take is that you like to bitch but you’re getting bitchy because other peeps are gathering on your once-private province of bitchery. There was a ton of bitching happening before you came here, and there will be tons of bitching happening after you leave. Cry into the void all you want, you just look like a bitch though
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.
$60 my man. 2TB. Less than a controller. You’ll survive.
I’d prefer they spend time optimizing CPU, GPU, RAM usage instead of storage size.
These are rarely mutually exclusive. Rather the opposite, as these textures and whatnot need to be pumped through RAM and VRAM via the CPU.
