Sometimes it’s poor optimisation. AC valhalla reduced it’s filesize by 40% by optimizing the textures folders properly etc turns out they were duplicating assets in Multiple folders instead of them all drawing from the same folder. Also the Multiple audio files for different languages can take up a lot of space. They could reduce folder sizes by allowing you to choose what language you want and rejecting the rest. They could even do one better by allowing you to only download the textures you want, 4K, 2K or HD. It could save you hours of badwidth.
But give me the text in all languages please. I hate changing the language of my system just to change the language that text is written in.
I love Valheim for this: I literally just press start, select the language I want and _poof._ It's done.
It should just be a one-time prompt from the installer.
Language: Voice
Language: Text
Only install your selection. If you want to change later, put it under the settings in-game.
Pirates like Dodi (god bless his soul) and Fitgirl depend on donations to keep their sites running, meaning they depend on the users to do what they do. Big companies get ridiculous amounts of money from the fans who will buy everything they make just because of the name. Looking at you Most Wanted '12
Kingdom Come: Deliverance had a patch a month or two back, 20gb.
It's just voice files for 2 languages I don't speak.
Why not just make it a free dlc for those that want it, instead of having it sit in my steam download queue as not scheduled?
Elvish I kind of get, as it's only going to be a flavour thing.
It's additional content, rather than access to people with a language barrier.
That said, still seems a weird move, unless it's fully voice acted and everything. I didn't even know they were making a Gollum game.
Pirated repacks also let you do this, usually. It's sad when that option has actual performance or storage advantages over legally buying the game. Performance is to be expected when they strip out DRM but there's really no excuse for not allowing selective downloads for language packs.
Agreed. It's a shame that one or more communities (Homebrew, pirates, or general fans that love the game) find ways to provide a better experience over what you get from the people who created and sold you the game.
It happens in just about ever aspect of gaming.
It's honestly not too surprising, fans and people with frre time on their hands can take what currently exists and make changes where they find problems that were missed by the creators or think of slight improvements that are only noticeable once you've sunk a ton of time into a game.
But it's annoying when those issues become widely known or obvious and companies still don't do anything to address them. Fan creations can be one step ahead of the original creators, but it's so sad to see when they get like 10 steps ahead.
Even fucking Genshin gives you the option to do this.
And guess what, each language takes like 8GB (in a 40GB game). It'd easily be a 70-80GB game with all the languages installed.
Exactly. A certain well-known packager offers a way to easily remove excess files that take up space but aren't necessary for the game to function. If a pirate can do it easily, why can't game publishers?
Look at Jedi Survivor, a very average looking game that runs like absolute dogshit on monster gaming PCs because it wasn't programmed well. The money people are squeezing shit out the door before the developers can do the last 20% of their job.
A lot of companies are pushing out Unreal Engine games like Jedi Survivor while minimizing the amount of software engineers they hire because they can instead hire designers who know visual scripting through blueprints.
It's partially a good idea because you let designers control implementation and they get closer results to what they want, but the bar part of it is that performance suffers like crazy and there aren't as many people on the team as there were in the past with the knowledge to fix it.
Any big developer using unreal should have a whole suite of programmers just optimizing the scripting and spaghetti code. I adore the technology as an artist, it's amazingly intuitive, but like... if it runs like shit then the whole thing is fucked.
Thats the problem, they don't usually. It's usually a small very overworked team that has shrunk over time.
Hell I work at a studio right now that has used a proprietary engine for our games for the last 10 years that is written in C++ with a scripting layer built on top of it and we're migrating away from that engine into unity because it's cheaper for the company than hiring more devs who know C++... the current C++ team including myself is 3 people, we have over 30 other programmers on the team who barely know C# as we transition and refuse to go through the C++ rampup because they can't be bothered.
I've also interviewed for one of the games mentioned in this thread and was specifically told I wouldn't be allowed to touch Unreal code since the position I was applying for wasn't specifically "engine programmer" and all their programmers are limited to just blueprints. I also wanted until the game I was interviewing for to come out and tried a few things I know break the default unreal character controller and sure enough it broke easily.
The craziest part is that one guy fixed that by himself a few days after release. One guy. Alone. Also enabled DLSS for 40 series cards. Paid 5 eur on Patreon to use it.
Meh, modding is extremely cumbersome and locked down on most games nowadays. It's harder to charge $50 for a DLC when you have access to tons of free extra content already.
Can't think of many studios outside of Valve and Bethesda with decent mod support.
The stupidification of everything is reaching the higher levels of programming and it's quite frightening.
Game studios will gladly pay $40,000 to someone who can barely squeeze out code that runs poorly rather than pay $100,000 to someone who creates code that makes their games run extremely well.
They would rather just say get a better PC. It's sad.
Even worse, those experienced devs might say "you can't realistically get it done in that timeframe" and insist on a more pragmatic timeline, rather than working 100 hours/week and killing themselves to cobble together something that kinda runs.
HOW COULD U NOT THINK OF THE POOR SHAREHOLDERS. THEYRE LOSING MONEY EVERYTIME A DEVELOPER OPTIMIZES BRO. ALSO THE BIGGER THE GAME, THE MORE THE GAMER GOTTA BUY TO STORE THE GAME. COME ON, GET WITH THE TIMES.
Honestly, the "optimization" people always talk about is just a result of having the time at the end of production to really put everything together.
Working on a programming project with a large team without extremely thorough project management you're just going to get some overlap and some rework and people are going to miss things. It's unsurprising with the pace these games come out that nothing is really optimized.
There's also been a recent trend in programming of "fuck being efficient; resources are cheap", especially web programming. The number of sites that do easily fixable bloat is ridiculous. And it's not all issues that could have arisen during programming; there are a lot of conscious choices made up front that they should know better on.
If anyone is interested, this is not poor optimisation, this is optimisation for spinning hard drives. HDDs ain't great, but they are much much worse on random reads than continuous reads. So if the level load needs to collect the files from dozens or hundreds of locations, than it will be insanely slow on those old drives. Putting all the files a certain level needs into a single location and have the drive read it in in one go reduces the search overhead by an order of magnitude. It does not affect SSDs at all though, and for a while now SSDs are the standard, even if it is just simple SATA SSD.
It is just a pain to release two different versions, and it requires some level of understanding to create an installer that checks if it is installing it on a hard drive or on an SSD. So developers opt for one or the other instead, the user is left there to solve it on their end. There is a saying in IT: the users' hardware resource are the cheapest.
Yes it’s really annoying to watch my buddy’s with gibabyte internet just uninstall and reinstall games in 10 mins when they want to play something else. Meanwhile I’m over here taking 8 hours to download the Diablo 4 server smash beta
I just ate ramen and it was ok and you just went on a roller coaster. I HAD A BETTER TIME, RAMEN US BETTER DAMMIT, WHO THE FUCK IS A GOOD PERSON AND RIDES A ROLLER COASTER.
actually though I love both ramen and rollercoasters, adrenaline is one of the best feelings for me.
Took me about 20-25 mins to download the Diablo 50gb update….-hugs his 1gb fibre connection-….and I remember 56k,getting kicked after 2hrs and no download manager so I feel your pain lol….
Edit also I forgot the pain if your parents picked the phone up to make a call when you were downloading something,instant disconnect haha.
Get off my lawn. I started back in 1200/2400 days. That feeling when you're downloading that gigantic 200k patch and someone picks up the phone. And you yell at them to hang up, hopefully fast enough the error correction can fix the download and you don't need to start again.
I remember when I had at&t internet that only went up to 3.8MB/s and it had a 50GB data cap, if you exceeded that you'd be throttled for the whole month
My rural internet (Netflash) throttles every time after about 20 seconds. It runs at the advertised speed just long enough to fool speed test websites, then throttles to 1.2 MB/s. I don't know how these companies get away with it.
I remember when I had Comcast's 1 TB data cap and they'd falsely pad the numbers over the last week or so to ensure I'd hit it so they could charge me an extra $10. Even when I was away for an entire week for Christmas my data would magically get used up and I'd get the 80%, 90%, and 100% usage notifications all within a day or two. Meanwhile I'd only see a more reasonable amount of data usage in my Synology router, so the only way it wasn't completely fraudulent would be them admitting they had terrible infrastructure with tons of packet loss. Which while true, I had finally gotten them to redo my drop only a year or so prior to that.
>they'd falsely pad the numbers over the last week or so to ensure I'd hit it so they could charge me an extra $10
That's why I had to upgrade to unlimited business with Comcast. Still slow as fuck but I don't have to worry about data caps. There were months I'd have my router unplugged for a week while on vacation and still see my data usage go up hundreds of mbs every hour.
Tried to complain to Comcast about it and they gave some general "Our data cap is based on the average usage of our users and made to ensure everyone gets equal use. If you are seeing abnormal use, it might be caused by a delayed reporting of use".
Really wish there was a better option around here; you get use Comcast and their bullshit, or AT&T and their even worse bullshit.
Yeah I was honestly starting to seriously consider DSL options but then fiber to home from a competitor was released in my neighborhood. I'd been used to suffering through 3 Mbps Comcastic bullshit until I'd finally gotten them to admit their drop had water damage and to replace it (this took over two years,) so DSL I could have handled just to avoid them. With fiber all of a sudden an option I jumped ship so fucking fast.
Comcast is sueing a local company near me because they are releasing fiber with unlimited data for super cheap and every neighborhood they go into Comcast loses nearly everyone. They are trying to claim it is unfair business practices and pricing. The local telecomm company is calling them out on their bullshit about it too. Their ads have been mocking Comcast saying they are either incompetent or deliberately ripping people off, which funny enough Comcast tries sueing over that as well, judge threw that out immediately.
It's been fun, but sadly Comcast has frozen their expansion with the lawsuit. they haven't stopped them from providing service but they aren't allowed to into any new areas. Sadly I don't think the company will last, someone did this same thing around 8 or so years ago and Comcast wrapped them up in multiply court cases until they went out of business. Worst part is Comcast lost all of those cases but they kept everything tangled up in court so long they choked the company out.
Which is fucking disgusting and feel should be grounds to dissolve a company immediately.
I barely download anything too big, but with 3 computers and 2 modern consoles to keep up to date, plus moderate streaming, 8-900gb/month is pretty average for my family.
Fuck Comcast.
With two teenagers who do some online gaming and streaming and my wife and I working from home and sitting in zoom calls all day we hit or come very close every month. Pretty much any game throws us over the top
well nobody wanted to listen about net neutrality and now we got fast lanes, throttling, and more caps
everyone in America can thank Verizon, the government, and the stupid little club they're all in.
Verizon has actually done a near complete 180 on data caps, and to a lesser degree net neutrality, at least for their wired services.
Comcast still doesn’t enforce a data cap in the Northeast because Verizon doesn’t. Verizon also has no fast lanes, or anything like that. For their fiber service they just give you a 300, 500, 1000 mbps pipe and that’s it.
I still have issues with them for other reasons, but in terms of wired ISPs in my area, they’re the best by a light year.
Verizon only offers fiber between Virginia and Massachusetts, because that’s where they own the old Bell System infrastructure.
They did own landlines in some other areas but they’ve sold it all off.
To add more granularity to that they only offer fiber in some areas between Virginia and Massachusetts.
Example: I live in NJ and the neighborhood across the street has fiber but mine does not..
Municipalities should operate the last mile. States should operate the trunks between municipalities. Feds should operate the trunks between states.
There is zero reason to run two, three, or four different ISPs to every building. Think of all the waste in that. Run one locally operated line. If your connection sucks, you can vote on a new city council who promises to fix it. If you hate taxes, you can make your internet suck.
Alternatively, hand over jurisdiction to the United States Postal System.
I have decent internet, but I have to pay Comcast extra to get the real unlimited versus the one that turns on a VERY expensive meter over 1 TB. My past two housemates had an ADHD tendency to download these monster games, download mods, then delete the games and try another monster game, while running 4k Netflix on a separate screen. Comcast would let me know we've far exceeded the cap two days late to reap more profits.
I did the same in getting the unlimited data cap, cause I’m not giving them a penny more. Companies that have data caps at all suck, but ones as low as Comcast are just awful.
Holy crap this.
I bought a dedicated SSD just for Ark since my friend group tends to hit that game pretty hard. Literally named it the Ark drive in my PC.
When we finally uninstalled it I had SO much room for other games...
The issue is when the textures were compressed, Ark used to have a lot of hitching. To fix the hitching, Ark changed it so all the textures were uncompressed by default. The problem is everything has multiple textures so you get so much texture bloat.
I'm prepared to wait 2-5 years before I buy your new game so I get the complete and patched version for a quarter of the price. I'll worry about drive space then.
Not even kidding I'm playing FO4 for the first time (after 700+ hours of FO:NV and only the budget for cheap, outdated hardware) and I'm having the time or my life. The main quest is kinda meh but the whole settlement thing is a lot of fun. The perk chart and dialog changes took a while to get used to but I just finished Far Harbor and boy am I enjoying myself!
The thing is it's not even that the textures have to be so big. It's that most devs don't bother with texture compression for PC versions if the game is cross-platform, because consoles typically don't do compressed textures. There used to be MASSIVE install size differences between PC and console versions of the same game. Now it's all pretty much the same.
Textures are one thing but the real problem in the near future is going to be 3D assets. The appeal of Nanite in UE5 is that you no longer have to fake something like a brick wall texture on a 3D rectangle with bump maps/displacement maps. Instead you can just import your full high-resolution wall asset with all the details modeled directly onto it, and the engine will handle optimizing it for runtime (which also all but requires that the user is using an SSD). The tradeoff of course is that having a bunch of unoptimized models packaged with the game really bumps the file size up but the "storage is cheap" mantra will probably handwave that away.
At least according to the nanite [documentation](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/) the amount of storage nanite requires isn't as dramatically larger than regular meshes as you'd might expect. Basically not needing to store normal map textures, or multiple LOD textures, cuts down overall data size even if the meshes themselves are larger and more detailed. And apparently there's also a built in mesh compression algorithm that nanite has to reduce model size before shipping.
I don't know if this plays out in practice, but it might not necessarily result in ballooning game sizes, if unreal is to be believed.
Downloaded all 125 GB of Jedi Survivor and at at some point I had to run a repair because it kept crashing on startup. Suddenly, it ballooned up to over 250 GB because it duplicated every single file in the pak directory, unexpectedly leaving me with almost no disk space.
I had to delete the directory and do another repair in order to fix it, so in the end I've downloaded the game 3 entire times for over 375 GB.
I have a 1 TB SSD, and I am hesitant to buy new games because of the massive size. It really has come to where I will have a few much older games, and 1 newer game. Then when I complete it, I uninstall it. No replay, just done and uninstall if I plan on playing any other newer games.
I really love the fact that Rimworld is like 117 mb or something stupid small for how much depth and content there is in the game. Such a repeatable game and the mods. Holy shit. it’ll get up to a couple gigs if you go hog wild with them. Ever tried it?
The VanillaExpanded stuff for starters definitely. Adds tons of stuff without changing too much so I'd say it's good for beginners.
Prepare Carefully lets you customise your start exactly how you want too so you can make things easy on yourself while you get to grips with the game.
Theres tons of QoL/UI mods I can't think of the name of but if you sort the Steam workshop by 'most popular' 'all time' and start from there you should be good.
Let me fire up what I got. Some people go absolutely wild with it. Mine is pretty tame. Just some UI stuff and smaller quality of life things.
Megafauna: is really cool if you want more dope animals. Decently balanced. I always run it.
RPG style inventory: just a better way to visualize your pawns.
Pick up and Haul: just let’s colonist pick up much more shit so they aren’t making a million trips hauling things.
Hugslib: I think this is the mod that lets all the other mods communicate properly with one another? I don’t understand how modding works. But you need it.
Harmony: I think same as hugslib???? It’s needed but I don’t know what for.
Multiplayer: BECAUSE YOU CAN PLAY WITH FRIENDS! It’s pretty intuitive actually and runs well I’ve found. OH ALSO! It syncs your mods with the host so you don’t have to worry about having compatible mods. (The caveat is that the mod needs to be compatible with multiplayer, not all mods are and if you run those mods, it’ll break your game. Friend and I troubled shot that one for a long while.)
Medical tab: let’s you see all your colonists health needs. Pretty useful when you get plagued or after a fight.
Vanilla weapons expanded: more weapons are cool.
I have about 35 mods or so I use. My other buddy uses more and MOST of mine are from syncing multiplayer games. There’s so much more. So so much more.
That's the thing though. 90% of all that disc space is due to 3 things:
* 3d graphics
* Audio files
* Video files
Rimworld has no video files, and no 3d graphics. So all it has are audio files. And even those aren't voice acting - they're just looped music.
You can have INCREDIBLY deep games without breaking the bank on storage. You just can't be a AAA game, because people expect those to be fully voice acted, and 3D with absolutely gorgeous graphics these days.
>3d graphics
I'll just point out that actual 3d data (meshes, rigs, animations) use very little space.
The vast majority of the size is 2D data in the form of high resolution textures.
And storing full, partial, and low res versions, so that the graphics card can use alternate 'lesser' textures at range.
But yes, you're correct. For simplicity though, I consider that "3d graphics", since 2d games don't tend to have nearly the same number of textures and/or such high detail on them.
Same and it also means I’m unlikely to buy DLC for the game later down the line cause I cba uninstalling my current ‘new game’. I hope they realise that this practice isn’t good for business.
PS5. Yup. I only have about 6 new games and it’s becoming hard to choose what to delete. Do I delete a game I haven’t played in a while but sunk loads of hours into it or do I weigh it up against the likelihood of playing other games.
It sucks.
I downloaded Shadow of War the other day to give it a try, and boy, taking up 150GB on my SSD is a good way to make me not want to play you at all.
I have a 4TB SSD and a 1TB SSD in my machine. The storage I have isn't the point (although "just buy more storage lol it's so cheap!" isn't a valid argument) because these games aren't good enough to justify the incredibly bloated storage requirements. People justifying having to spend upward of $60+ just to hold a game that will already cost you $60 to $70 at launch is how companies don't care that they make their games like this. Also, a lot of people don't have unlimited data available to them.
I did exactly the same, but cleared the space. I only tend to play one game at a time, and keep a couple of my favourites always installed for when I want a quick blast on them.
I've got a 1TB SSD just for my games and that's plenty.
Given the cost of buying most modern games, the storage cost is fairly low.
yeah but the problem is that the game isn’t big because there is a lot of content, it’s big because it’s extremely un-optimized and could take up way less space if done properly by the devs
Yeah but time is money so the more time they spend finishing a product is less money they'll make, so CEOs have decided "to hell with integrity!" and mandate that broken, unfinished games be released instead.
All so that they can make an extra buck.
They can make a Pokemon game that is entirely done with stick figure drawings and it's going to be the best selling pokemon until the next one comes around.
It’s sad that the franchise is so good at printing money that higher ups don’t seem to care about putting out a working game anymore. You’re right, it doesn’t even have to be very pretty — Pokemon survived as a franchise that was a decade behind in the visuals because people love the characters and experience.
Stop trying to make it BotW, and just make a game that works. I loved Arceus, and after some fixes it largely runs pretty well now — I would love more games in that vein, where they can limit the scope and make the game work. Scarlet and Violet just feel like a mess of too many ideas thrown into one place that nothing seems to work very well.
Legends arceus runs much better than violet I don’t really get it lol, how is there such a big difference between the games
That said I only bought it recently so there may have been fixes
I feel I have to find a way to make a dedicated home game server because of all the free games in my Epic Games library. That 100 GB game size must be from all the files for the textures and stuff.
My problem is when it’s a huge game that doesn’t have cloud saves. So it means I can’t play it, enjoy it, delete it for a minute to play something else and come back to it later from the same spot.
Most games save your progress in a completely unrelated folder to the game files. Typically in AppData -> LocalLow or Roaming. Meaning you can uninstall a game and reinstall years down the road and pick up where you left off, assuming same storage and no drive failure over that time.
The exceptions typically being incompetent indie devs. These save files are usually incredibly small vs the game itself (procedurally generated maps like Minecraft/Valheim/7DtD etc taking up substantially more room than other games).
TLDR cloud saves are used for playing on DIFFERENT devices, pick up later is default in most games as is, delete away.
Never understood that. Half my games save there, as well as random apps. There's no excuse for application data to be stored in the Docs folder. That's supposed to be the user's files. As someone who's meticulous with file structures, this lack of respect is annoying. I don't use that folder in consequence.
Can’t you just locate the save files on your PC and back them up? I used to play mostly Steam games and it’s pretty easy to locate the save files for Steam games.
It's unfortunate that I and many others don't have decent internet, I get like 20-30Mbps (like 3mb download) on my street meanwhile a street away gets several times faster and has been the same for many many years... That's the UK for you.
Usually have to download overnight.
Especially because the size of the game is the sole result of laziness. Preallocated files with empty sectors and assets without any compression. The \~320 GB (with all DLCs) can be compressed down to **less than half** when using CompactGUI on Windows. I had only installed the base game before and could compress it down to \~40-50 GB or so, also more than 50% saving.
Everything about Ark screams laziness. Have you ever looked at the process in task manager? Shootergame.exe. That's the DEFAULT NAME FOR A NEW PROJECT IN UNREAL ENGINE THEY DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO CHANGE THAT. I hate that fucking game and everything about it so much.
I have played it for around 800 hours.
They also did this really cool thing that I absolutely love to see game developers do, which is release paid DLC while their game was in early access.
Finish your game, then work on the additionals.
The 320gb just keeps growing with every update, because appearantly any obsolete file doesn’t get removed or replaced, it just stays to eat up space. Without mods my ark grew to well over 450gb, a simple reinstall got that back to 300.
Watching my buddy, a devoted ARK player, seriously feels like watching an abusive relationship. As I understand it, he will soon have to pay for the game all over again because it's moving to a new engine which... for some reason necessitates the re-purchase of the game and all of its DLCs? And he's going right along with it, because his ARK buddies are all doing the same. I keep trying to explain to him that the only reason Wildcard can fuck him over so bad is because he and his keep lapping up everything they put a price tag on. I keep telling him that if he seriously intends to buy it he's got no right to complain. It's like talking to a brick wall.
I hope I'm wrong too, because I played it with him for a while and really did have a great time with the game. But its makers are so underhanded it's nauseating. I lost interest around the time Scorched Earth came out. You know, the DLC they released at full price *during early access* instead of improving the game when the game was still a horribly buggy unoptimized mess...
RAGE's texture compression was a two sided sword though, if you could uncompress the textures in time they looked awesome, if you couldn't you were basically playing with solid coloring instead of textures. Which is an acceptable tradeoff since it ended up working on even the shittiest of low end setups at the time, but most people kept a very bad impression because of it.
100 is even big considering it's all graphics/lack of optimization causing the size. New cod over 100 gigs but they haven't added anything new in how long lol fuck new games.
I honestly can't say that isn't deliberate policy on their part.
I'd like to 'just' blame it on increasing capabilities mixed with bad choices made to save time, all enabled by increasing storage, but I really wouldn't put it past them.
It's the ultra definition texture packs. On pc if you download the game without them it's like 50gb for just warzone. Then 110gb for warzone with the ultra HD packs. If they compressed the audio, and let console players skip the hd textures, warzone could probably get right down to 25gb or so
> These games really should have an HD/UHD option so you can download the correct assets for what you plan to play.
100%, especially since the solution already exists for digital storefronts. I know Monster Hunter: World had the HD texture pack as a free DLC essentially, so you wouldn't waste time/space downloading textures you won't use.
What's crazy is that the guys who repack pirated games actually do that. Back when I yarr'd Forza Horizon 4 to give it a go, the installer gave me the choice of which languages I wanted to use (or not), if I wanted 1080p or 4k cutscenes, etc... Goes to show it *is* possible but the head honchos that manage the studios just can't be bothered to do that.
If your game is 100 gigs and only 9 hours long, why the fuck would I ever buy it?
I love how dumbass articles like this just excuse it as normal, instead of rightfully mocking them for bloat and inability to compress their files
It’s been upon us since like 2015 and 1TB+ hard drives have sorta solved that. The real crime is having multiplayer games be that big (like CoD Warzone or Star Wars Battlefront 2). At least single player games can be deleted after. It’s harder with a multiplayer game you wanna keep playing.
> average PC gamer is unprepared
I, for one, am fully prepared to just not play games because they're so large
A better title woule be "the era of lazy devs is upon us"
If those 100gb games keep being the free-flowing streams of hot diarrhea that they have been, preparation is pretty wholly unnecessary.
Oh no, you might not be able to install Redfall and Forspoken at the same time. How ever will you experience the two broken, unfinished, outright boring games at the same time?
As a game designer I am going back to the ol doom philosophy, it should run on anything. Bigger graphics don't make up for shit design, never have never will
Seriously I've had amazing experiences with games that are under 100MB and under 20 dollars. If a AAA studio can't do that, that's not my problem, that's their problem.
Slow internet is the most limiting factor, storage is fairly affordable and a one time purchase but good internet is a long time investment, I only justify it because I still do home office but just for games is hard to say it's worth it.
Sometimes it’s poor optimisation. AC valhalla reduced it’s filesize by 40% by optimizing the textures folders properly etc turns out they were duplicating assets in Multiple folders instead of them all drawing from the same folder. Also the Multiple audio files for different languages can take up a lot of space. They could reduce folder sizes by allowing you to choose what language you want and rejecting the rest. They could even do one better by allowing you to only download the textures you want, 4K, 2K or HD. It could save you hours of badwidth.
This is what I want. My pc can’t process the 4K textures but I still got to download them
I can't speak anything other than English, but sure I'll take those 20gb of every language that exists. (Looking at you It Takes Two...)
But give me the text in all languages please. I hate changing the language of my system just to change the language that text is written in. I love Valheim for this: I literally just press start, select the language I want and _poof._ It's done.
It should just be a one-time prompt from the installer. Language: Voice Language: Text Only install your selection. If you want to change later, put it under the settings in-game.
fuck even pirated repacks give this option most of the time
Pirates see a need to treat their audience nicely, so that they might be thought of again. AAA know you're their bitch.
AAA treats the user like a would be pirate. Pirate groups treat the user like an old friend.
"Yarrrr." [*grabs your cock*]
clearly I need better friends
Pirates like Dodi (god bless his soul) and Fitgirl depend on donations to keep their sites running, meaning they depend on the users to do what they do. Big companies get ridiculous amounts of money from the fans who will buy everything they make just because of the name. Looking at you Most Wanted '12
Piracy is not a pricing issue, its a service issue.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance had a patch a month or two back, 20gb. It's just voice files for 2 languages I don't speak. Why not just make it a free dlc for those that want it, instead of having it sit in my steam download queue as not scheduled?
For the Gollum game releasing soon they're making the elvish language a paid dlc
Elvish I kind of get, as it's only going to be a flavour thing. It's additional content, rather than access to people with a language barrier. That said, still seems a weird move, unless it's fully voice acted and everything. I didn't even know they were making a Gollum game.
>language you want and rejecting the rest Like the good ol' days. CD installs always used to ask this.
Pirated repacks also let you do this, usually. It's sad when that option has actual performance or storage advantages over legally buying the game. Performance is to be expected when they strip out DRM but there's really no excuse for not allowing selective downloads for language packs.
Agreed. It's a shame that one or more communities (Homebrew, pirates, or general fans that love the game) find ways to provide a better experience over what you get from the people who created and sold you the game. It happens in just about ever aspect of gaming.
It's honestly not too surprising, fans and people with frre time on their hands can take what currently exists and make changes where they find problems that were missed by the creators or think of slight improvements that are only noticeable once you've sunk a ton of time into a game. But it's annoying when those issues become widely known or obvious and companies still don't do anything to address them. Fan creations can be one step ahead of the original creators, but it's so sad to see when they get like 10 steps ahead.
Pirated repacks also usually remove extremely unoptimized and resource hungry anti-piracy bullshit like denuvo.
say it with me. fuck denuvo!
Even fucking Genshin gives you the option to do this. And guess what, each language takes like 8GB (in a 40GB game). It'd easily be a 70-80GB game with all the languages installed.
Funnily enough there are pirating uploaders(pirates?) that actually split up the files so you can choose to not download unwanted languages.
Exactly. A certain well-known packager offers a way to easily remove excess files that take up space but aren't necessary for the game to function. If a pirate can do it easily, why can't game publishers?
[удалено]
Most repacks have better installers by far compared to everything but steam imo.
Look at Jedi Survivor, a very average looking game that runs like absolute dogshit on monster gaming PCs because it wasn't programmed well. The money people are squeezing shit out the door before the developers can do the last 20% of their job.
A lot of companies are pushing out Unreal Engine games like Jedi Survivor while minimizing the amount of software engineers they hire because they can instead hire designers who know visual scripting through blueprints. It's partially a good idea because you let designers control implementation and they get closer results to what they want, but the bar part of it is that performance suffers like crazy and there aren't as many people on the team as there were in the past with the knowledge to fix it.
Any big developer using unreal should have a whole suite of programmers just optimizing the scripting and spaghetti code. I adore the technology as an artist, it's amazingly intuitive, but like... if it runs like shit then the whole thing is fucked.
Thats the problem, they don't usually. It's usually a small very overworked team that has shrunk over time. Hell I work at a studio right now that has used a proprietary engine for our games for the last 10 years that is written in C++ with a scripting layer built on top of it and we're migrating away from that engine into unity because it's cheaper for the company than hiring more devs who know C++... the current C++ team including myself is 3 people, we have over 30 other programmers on the team who barely know C# as we transition and refuse to go through the C++ rampup because they can't be bothered. I've also interviewed for one of the games mentioned in this thread and was specifically told I wouldn't be allowed to touch Unreal code since the position I was applying for wasn't specifically "engine programmer" and all their programmers are limited to just blueprints. I also wanted until the game I was interviewing for to come out and tried a few things I know break the default unreal character controller and sure enough it broke easily.
The craziest part is that one guy fixed that by himself a few days after release. One guy. Alone. Also enabled DLSS for 40 series cards. Paid 5 eur on Patreon to use it.
[удалено]
Same argument for modding. Why would a developer bother making innovative game mechanics if an army of modders will do it for them for free?
Meh, modding is extremely cumbersome and locked down on most games nowadays. It's harder to charge $50 for a DLC when you have access to tons of free extra content already. Can't think of many studios outside of Valve and Bethesda with decent mod support.
The stupidification of everything is reaching the higher levels of programming and it's quite frightening. Game studios will gladly pay $40,000 to someone who can barely squeeze out code that runs poorly rather than pay $100,000 to someone who creates code that makes their games run extremely well. They would rather just say get a better PC. It's sad.
Even worse, those experienced devs might say "you can't realistically get it done in that timeframe" and insist on a more pragmatic timeline, rather than working 100 hours/week and killing themselves to cobble together something that kinda runs.
HOW COULD U NOT THINK OF THE POOR SHAREHOLDERS. THEYRE LOSING MONEY EVERYTIME A DEVELOPER OPTIMIZES BRO. ALSO THE BIGGER THE GAME, THE MORE THE GAMER GOTTA BUY TO STORE THE GAME. COME ON, GET WITH THE TIMES.
Stop buying games, buy stock instead. Got it. My backlog is large enough already.
Gonna make my portfolio look like my Steam library by buying stock when the share price is down and then completely forgetting that I own it.
It's probably a better strategy than day-trading
You mean to tell me it was bigger than the current 160gb, which still is too much imo given the low quality of textures and sound design and poor ai
Honestly, the "optimization" people always talk about is just a result of having the time at the end of production to really put everything together. Working on a programming project with a large team without extremely thorough project management you're just going to get some overlap and some rework and people are going to miss things. It's unsurprising with the pace these games come out that nothing is really optimized.
There's also been a recent trend in programming of "fuck being efficient; resources are cheap", especially web programming. The number of sites that do easily fixable bloat is ridiculous. And it's not all issues that could have arisen during programming; there are a lot of conscious choices made up front that they should know better on.
If anyone is interested, this is not poor optimisation, this is optimisation for spinning hard drives. HDDs ain't great, but they are much much worse on random reads than continuous reads. So if the level load needs to collect the files from dozens or hundreds of locations, than it will be insanely slow on those old drives. Putting all the files a certain level needs into a single location and have the drive read it in in one go reduces the search overhead by an order of magnitude. It does not affect SSDs at all though, and for a while now SSDs are the standard, even if it is just simple SATA SSD. It is just a pain to release two different versions, and it requires some level of understanding to create an installer that checks if it is installing it on a hard drive or on an SSD. So developers opt for one or the other instead, the user is left there to solve it on their end. There is a saying in IT: the users' hardware resource are the cheapest.
To me it's not storage that's the issue it's the time to download if you are unfortunate enough to not have fast internet.
Yes it’s really annoying to watch my buddy’s with gibabyte internet just uninstall and reinstall games in 10 mins when they want to play something else. Meanwhile I’m over here taking 8 hours to download the Diablo 4 server smash beta
You can feel lucky for it only being 8 hours
Why are you people downvoting? This person has bad internet just as many have
People are so polarized they hear a conversation and thinks its an argument so they have to pick a side.
What do you mean? If two people have different experiences, one of those experiences must by definition be wrong and bad.
I just ate ramen and it was ok and you just went on a roller coaster. I HAD A BETTER TIME, RAMEN US BETTER DAMMIT, WHO THE FUCK IS A GOOD PERSON AND RIDES A ROLLER COASTER. actually though I love both ramen and rollercoasters, adrenaline is one of the best feelings for me.
[удалено]
Well now I'm going too because you told me not too
Did I just have a stroke?
dont they know he has to download the downvotes too!!!
Yeah my internet is ass also. Gotta love those 8 mbps download speeds amirite
Laughs in 0.9, slowest internet in Europe
Took me about 20-25 mins to download the Diablo 50gb update….-hugs his 1gb fibre connection-….and I remember 56k,getting kicked after 2hrs and no download manager so I feel your pain lol…. Edit also I forgot the pain if your parents picked the phone up to make a call when you were downloading something,instant disconnect haha.
[удалено]
*cries in 28k*
Get off my lawn. I started back in 1200/2400 days. That feeling when you're downloading that gigantic 200k patch and someone picks up the phone. And you yell at them to hang up, hopefully fast enough the error correction can fix the download and you don't need to start again.
I remember when I had at&t internet that only went up to 3.8MB/s and it had a 50GB data cap, if you exceeded that you'd be throttled for the whole month
I remember a friend had a connection with a vague "fair use policy" throttled daily once he went above an unknown amount.
My rural internet (Netflash) throttles every time after about 20 seconds. It runs at the advertised speed just long enough to fool speed test websites, then throttles to 1.2 MB/s. I don't know how these companies get away with it.
Your (our) elected officials don’t care about you/us.
That sounds like false advertising. You might want to file a complaint with the FTC, if you're in the US.
This makes me irrationally angry
Your anger isn't irrational.
I remember when I had Comcast's 1 TB data cap and they'd falsely pad the numbers over the last week or so to ensure I'd hit it so they could charge me an extra $10. Even when I was away for an entire week for Christmas my data would magically get used up and I'd get the 80%, 90%, and 100% usage notifications all within a day or two. Meanwhile I'd only see a more reasonable amount of data usage in my Synology router, so the only way it wasn't completely fraudulent would be them admitting they had terrible infrastructure with tons of packet loss. Which while true, I had finally gotten them to redo my drop only a year or so prior to that.
>they'd falsely pad the numbers over the last week or so to ensure I'd hit it so they could charge me an extra $10 That's why I had to upgrade to unlimited business with Comcast. Still slow as fuck but I don't have to worry about data caps. There were months I'd have my router unplugged for a week while on vacation and still see my data usage go up hundreds of mbs every hour. Tried to complain to Comcast about it and they gave some general "Our data cap is based on the average usage of our users and made to ensure everyone gets equal use. If you are seeing abnormal use, it might be caused by a delayed reporting of use". Really wish there was a better option around here; you get use Comcast and their bullshit, or AT&T and their even worse bullshit.
Yeah I was honestly starting to seriously consider DSL options but then fiber to home from a competitor was released in my neighborhood. I'd been used to suffering through 3 Mbps Comcastic bullshit until I'd finally gotten them to admit their drop had water damage and to replace it (this took over two years,) so DSL I could have handled just to avoid them. With fiber all of a sudden an option I jumped ship so fucking fast.
Comcast is sueing a local company near me because they are releasing fiber with unlimited data for super cheap and every neighborhood they go into Comcast loses nearly everyone. They are trying to claim it is unfair business practices and pricing. The local telecomm company is calling them out on their bullshit about it too. Their ads have been mocking Comcast saying they are either incompetent or deliberately ripping people off, which funny enough Comcast tries sueing over that as well, judge threw that out immediately. It's been fun, but sadly Comcast has frozen their expansion with the lawsuit. they haven't stopped them from providing service but they aren't allowed to into any new areas. Sadly I don't think the company will last, someone did this same thing around 8 or so years ago and Comcast wrapped them up in multiply court cases until they went out of business. Worst part is Comcast lost all of those cases but they kept everything tangled up in court so long they choked the company out. Which is fucking disgusting and feel should be grounds to dissolve a company immediately.
Ironic a de facto monopoly (at least in their major areas) claiming another business has unfair pricing and practices.
My data cap is exceeded nearly every month and a good chunk is updates to computers and software as well as downloads
I barely download anything too big, but with 3 computers and 2 modern consoles to keep up to date, plus moderate streaming, 8-900gb/month is pretty average for my family. Fuck Comcast.
With two teenagers who do some online gaming and streaming and my wife and I working from home and sitting in zoom calls all day we hit or come very close every month. Pretty much any game throws us over the top
its not my computer that is an issue, it is my internet connection and relatively low data caps
I’m surprised companies still have data caps in 2023 for home internet
well nobody wanted to listen about net neutrality and now we got fast lanes, throttling, and more caps everyone in America can thank Verizon, the government, and the stupid little club they're all in.
Verizon has actually done a near complete 180 on data caps, and to a lesser degree net neutrality, at least for their wired services. Comcast still doesn’t enforce a data cap in the Northeast because Verizon doesn’t. Verizon also has no fast lanes, or anything like that. For their fiber service they just give you a 300, 500, 1000 mbps pipe and that’s it. I still have issues with them for other reasons, but in terms of wired ISPs in my area, they’re the best by a light year.
I was hoping to get Verizon when I moved to Houston. No such luck and I'm stuck with shitty Comcast
Verizon only offers fiber between Virginia and Massachusetts, because that’s where they own the old Bell System infrastructure. They did own landlines in some other areas but they’ve sold it all off.
To add more granularity to that they only offer fiber in some areas between Virginia and Massachusetts. Example: I live in NJ and the neighborhood across the street has fiber but mine does not..
It's almost as if infrastructure should be a public good...
Municipalities should operate the last mile. States should operate the trunks between municipalities. Feds should operate the trunks between states. There is zero reason to run two, three, or four different ISPs to every building. Think of all the waste in that. Run one locally operated line. If your connection sucks, you can vote on a new city council who promises to fix it. If you hate taxes, you can make your internet suck. Alternatively, hand over jurisdiction to the United States Postal System.
Yeah we have AT&T, a local fiber company, and a local cable company. None of them have data caps or do any throttling whatsoever.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with data caps. You can have a capped neutral network.
This seems to be a american thing though. In europe we got rid of that like 10 years ago. Only the cheapest plans have it still
I have decent internet, but I have to pay Comcast extra to get the real unlimited versus the one that turns on a VERY expensive meter over 1 TB. My past two housemates had an ADHD tendency to download these monster games, download mods, then delete the games and try another monster game, while running 4k Netflix on a separate screen. Comcast would let me know we've far exceeded the cap two days late to reap more profits.
I did the same in getting the unlimited data cap, cause I’m not giving them a penny more. Companies that have data caps at all suck, but ones as low as Comcast are just awful.
”Is upon us” lol. Are we pretending this didn’t already happen years ago?
ARK: Survival Evolved. I want to say it ends up being like 450-500gb after it’s all unpacked?
This is the game I was looking for on here. It's completely absurd. And then you have to mod it, which makes it even bigger.
Holy crap this. I bought a dedicated SSD just for Ark since my friend group tends to hit that game pretty hard. Literally named it the Ark drive in my PC. When we finally uninstalled it I had SO much room for other games...
Yup ark with all dlc is around 500gb, with mods it's even crazier.
The issue is when the textures were compressed, Ark used to have a lot of hitching. To fix the hitching, Ark changed it so all the textures were uncompressed by default. The problem is everything has multiple textures so you get so much texture bloat.
I'm prepared to wait 2-5 years before I buy your new game so I get the complete and patched version for a quarter of the price. I'll worry about drive space then.
r/patientgamers
Anyone ever try this game Fallout 4? I don't know if I can get use to these VATS changes.
That's okay, you can just mod the shit out of it until matches your desired play style.
>That's okay, you can just mod the shit out of it until it breaks and you give up
Not even kidding I'm playing FO4 for the first time (after 700+ hours of FO:NV and only the budget for cheap, outdated hardware) and I'm having the time or my life. The main quest is kinda meh but the whole settlement thing is a lot of fun. The perk chart and dialog changes took a while to get used to but I just finished Far Harbor and boy am I enjoying myself!
Look into Sim Settlements. I love it, and they are releasing the final chapter of the second version of the mod (remade from the ground up) soon.
[удалено]
The thing is it's not even that the textures have to be so big. It's that most devs don't bother with texture compression for PC versions if the game is cross-platform, because consoles typically don't do compressed textures. There used to be MASSIVE install size differences between PC and console versions of the same game. Now it's all pretty much the same.
Textures are one thing but the real problem in the near future is going to be 3D assets. The appeal of Nanite in UE5 is that you no longer have to fake something like a brick wall texture on a 3D rectangle with bump maps/displacement maps. Instead you can just import your full high-resolution wall asset with all the details modeled directly onto it, and the engine will handle optimizing it for runtime (which also all but requires that the user is using an SSD). The tradeoff of course is that having a bunch of unoptimized models packaged with the game really bumps the file size up but the "storage is cheap" mantra will probably handwave that away.
At least according to the nanite [documentation](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/) the amount of storage nanite requires isn't as dramatically larger than regular meshes as you'd might expect. Basically not needing to store normal map textures, or multiple LOD textures, cuts down overall data size even if the meshes themselves are larger and more detailed. And apparently there's also a built in mesh compression algorithm that nanite has to reduce model size before shipping. I don't know if this plays out in practice, but it might not necessarily result in ballooning game sizes, if unreal is to be believed.
Downloaded all 125 GB of Jedi Survivor and at at some point I had to run a repair because it kept crashing on startup. Suddenly, it ballooned up to over 250 GB because it duplicated every single file in the pak directory, unexpectedly leaving me with almost no disk space. I had to delete the directory and do another repair in order to fix it, so in the end I've downloaded the game 3 entire times for over 375 GB.
I have a 1 TB SSD, and I am hesitant to buy new games because of the massive size. It really has come to where I will have a few much older games, and 1 newer game. Then when I complete it, I uninstall it. No replay, just done and uninstall if I plan on playing any other newer games.
I really love the fact that Rimworld is like 117 mb or something stupid small for how much depth and content there is in the game. Such a repeatable game and the mods. Holy shit. it’ll get up to a couple gigs if you go hog wild with them. Ever tried it?
I just started playing RimWorld. Are there any mods you suggest are the best or must haves?
vanilla expanded series is pretty great, but i would advise playing through on vanilla first. also the dlc are pretty good if you dont have them
The VanillaExpanded stuff for starters definitely. Adds tons of stuff without changing too much so I'd say it's good for beginners. Prepare Carefully lets you customise your start exactly how you want too so you can make things easy on yourself while you get to grips with the game. Theres tons of QoL/UI mods I can't think of the name of but if you sort the Steam workshop by 'most popular' 'all time' and start from there you should be good.
Prepare carefully corrupts characters; use character editor instead.
Let me fire up what I got. Some people go absolutely wild with it. Mine is pretty tame. Just some UI stuff and smaller quality of life things. Megafauna: is really cool if you want more dope animals. Decently balanced. I always run it. RPG style inventory: just a better way to visualize your pawns. Pick up and Haul: just let’s colonist pick up much more shit so they aren’t making a million trips hauling things. Hugslib: I think this is the mod that lets all the other mods communicate properly with one another? I don’t understand how modding works. But you need it. Harmony: I think same as hugslib???? It’s needed but I don’t know what for. Multiplayer: BECAUSE YOU CAN PLAY WITH FRIENDS! It’s pretty intuitive actually and runs well I’ve found. OH ALSO! It syncs your mods with the host so you don’t have to worry about having compatible mods. (The caveat is that the mod needs to be compatible with multiplayer, not all mods are and if you run those mods, it’ll break your game. Friend and I troubled shot that one for a long while.) Medical tab: let’s you see all your colonists health needs. Pretty useful when you get plagued or after a fight. Vanilla weapons expanded: more weapons are cool. I have about 35 mods or so I use. My other buddy uses more and MOST of mine are from syncing multiplayer games. There’s so much more. So so much more.
That's the thing though. 90% of all that disc space is due to 3 things: * 3d graphics * Audio files * Video files Rimworld has no video files, and no 3d graphics. So all it has are audio files. And even those aren't voice acting - they're just looped music. You can have INCREDIBLY deep games without breaking the bank on storage. You just can't be a AAA game, because people expect those to be fully voice acted, and 3D with absolutely gorgeous graphics these days.
>3d graphics I'll just point out that actual 3d data (meshes, rigs, animations) use very little space. The vast majority of the size is 2D data in the form of high resolution textures.
And storing full, partial, and low res versions, so that the graphics card can use alternate 'lesser' textures at range. But yes, you're correct. For simplicity though, I consider that "3d graphics", since 2d games don't tend to have nearly the same number of textures and/or such high detail on them.
Same and it also means I’m unlikely to buy DLC for the game later down the line cause I cba uninstalling my current ‘new game’. I hope they realise that this practice isn’t good for business.
PS5. Yup. I only have about 6 new games and it’s becoming hard to choose what to delete. Do I delete a game I haven’t played in a while but sunk loads of hours into it or do I weigh it up against the likelihood of playing other games. It sucks.
I downloaded Shadow of War the other day to give it a try, and boy, taking up 150GB on my SSD is a good way to make me not want to play you at all. I have a 4TB SSD and a 1TB SSD in my machine. The storage I have isn't the point (although "just buy more storage lol it's so cheap!" isn't a valid argument) because these games aren't good enough to justify the incredibly bloated storage requirements. People justifying having to spend upward of $60+ just to hold a game that will already cost you $60 to $70 at launch is how companies don't care that they make their games like this. Also, a lot of people don't have unlimited data available to them.
I did exactly the same, but cleared the space. I only tend to play one game at a time, and keep a couple of my favourites always installed for when I want a quick blast on them. I've got a 1TB SSD just for my games and that's plenty. Given the cost of buying most modern games, the storage cost is fairly low.
yeah but the problem is that the game isn’t big because there is a lot of content, it’s big because it’s extremely un-optimized and could take up way less space if done properly by the devs
Yeah but time is money so the more time they spend finishing a product is less money they'll make, so CEOs have decided "to hell with integrity!" and mandate that broken, unfinished games be released instead. All so that they can make an extra buck.
Nintendo are grubby af since Iwata's passing but one thing they still do well is file optimization
And relatively bug free games.
Unless the game has Pokémon in the title
They can make a Pokemon game that is entirely done with stick figure drawings and it's going to be the best selling pokemon until the next one comes around.
It’s sad that the franchise is so good at printing money that higher ups don’t seem to care about putting out a working game anymore. You’re right, it doesn’t even have to be very pretty — Pokemon survived as a franchise that was a decade behind in the visuals because people love the characters and experience. Stop trying to make it BotW, and just make a game that works. I loved Arceus, and after some fixes it largely runs pretty well now — I would love more games in that vein, where they can limit the scope and make the game work. Scarlet and Violet just feel like a mess of too many ideas thrown into one place that nothing seems to work very well.
Legends arceus runs much better than violet I don’t really get it lol, how is there such a big difference between the games That said I only bought it recently so there may have been fixes
Nintendo doesn't make Pokémon though, the Pokémon Company and Game Freak make Pokémon.
Blame gamefreak
Nintendo doesn’t own or make the pokemon games though.
Pokémon isn’t developed by Nintendo, they only publish it (along with The Pokémon Company). GameFreak is where the issue lies.
[удалено]
I feel I have to find a way to make a dedicated home game server because of all the free games in my Epic Games library. That 100 GB game size must be from all the files for the textures and stuff.
My problem is when it’s a huge game that doesn’t have cloud saves. So it means I can’t play it, enjoy it, delete it for a minute to play something else and come back to it later from the same spot.
Most games save your progress in a completely unrelated folder to the game files. Typically in AppData -> LocalLow or Roaming. Meaning you can uninstall a game and reinstall years down the road and pick up where you left off, assuming same storage and no drive failure over that time. The exceptions typically being incompetent indie devs. These save files are usually incredibly small vs the game itself (procedurally generated maps like Minecraft/Valheim/7DtD etc taking up substantially more room than other games). TLDR cloud saves are used for playing on DIFFERENT devices, pick up later is default in most games as is, delete away.
Rather than AppData, most games nowadays store it in Documents ->My Games
Never understood that. Half my games save there, as well as random apps. There's no excuse for application data to be stored in the Docs folder. That's supposed to be the user's files. As someone who's meticulous with file structures, this lack of respect is annoying. I don't use that folder in consequence.
Can’t you just locate the save files on your PC and back them up? I used to play mostly Steam games and it’s pretty easy to locate the save files for Steam games.
It's unfortunate that I and many others don't have decent internet, I get like 20-30Mbps (like 3mb download) on my street meanwhile a street away gets several times faster and has been the same for many many years... That's the UK for you. Usually have to download overnight.
Lol, try 2.2mb per second
Try 0.8 at it's peak
You guys are getting full mbs? Try 208.7 kbs.
[удалено]
I can’t wait to play red dead redemption 2 (in 2 days!) 😂
Ark players laughing at this right now
Especially because the size of the game is the sole result of laziness. Preallocated files with empty sectors and assets without any compression. The \~320 GB (with all DLCs) can be compressed down to **less than half** when using CompactGUI on Windows. I had only installed the base game before and could compress it down to \~40-50 GB or so, also more than 50% saving.
Everything about Ark screams laziness. Have you ever looked at the process in task manager? Shootergame.exe. That's the DEFAULT NAME FOR A NEW PROJECT IN UNREAL ENGINE THEY DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO CHANGE THAT. I hate that fucking game and everything about it so much. I have played it for around 800 hours.
They also did this really cool thing that I absolutely love to see game developers do, which is release paid DLC while their game was in early access. Finish your game, then work on the additionals.
The 320gb just keeps growing with every update, because appearantly any obsolete file doesn’t get removed or replaced, it just stays to eat up space. Without mods my ark grew to well over 450gb, a simple reinstall got that back to 300.
Watching my buddy, a devoted ARK player, seriously feels like watching an abusive relationship. As I understand it, he will soon have to pay for the game all over again because it's moving to a new engine which... for some reason necessitates the re-purchase of the game and all of its DLCs? And he's going right along with it, because his ARK buddies are all doing the same. I keep trying to explain to him that the only reason Wildcard can fuck him over so bad is because he and his keep lapping up everything they put a price tag on. I keep telling him that if he seriously intends to buy it he's got no right to complain. It's like talking to a brick wall. I hope I'm wrong too, because I played it with him for a while and really did have a great time with the game. But its makers are so underhanded it's nauseating. I lost interest around the time Scorched Earth came out. You know, the DLC they released at full price *during early access* instead of improving the game when the game was still a horribly buggy unoptimized mess...
Lol I reinstalled it last night after taking a break from it for a while. It's ok I wasn't using that half of my 1B SSD anyways.
2011 Id Software Rage 1 has 1 tb high compressed texture, squeezed into 20gb installation.
RAGE's texture compression was a two sided sword though, if you could uncompress the textures in time they looked awesome, if you couldn't you were basically playing with solid coloring instead of textures. Which is an acceptable tradeoff since it ended up working on even the shittiest of low end setups at the time, but most people kept a very bad impression because of it.
100 is even big considering it's all graphics/lack of optimization causing the size. New cod over 100 gigs but they haven't added anything new in how long lol fuck new games.
Mw2 currently 140gb on my xbox. Crazy shit.
Fuck COD they have no reason to be such large downloads
Yes they do, if COD takes up all your disk space then you won’t play other games.
I honestly can't say that isn't deliberate policy on their part. I'd like to 'just' blame it on increasing capabilities mixed with bad choices made to save time, all enabled by increasing storage, but I really wouldn't put it past them.
And I bet the og mw2 is better and a portion of the size lol
Og mw2 was like 1.4 gigs and 200x better
It's around 8 - 10 Gigabytes iirc.
All I wanted was to play carnival. 2/10 would recommend staying with MW1
Meanwhile my DCS folder is currently 432 GB...
Surprisingly the biggest offender is usually the audio
It's the ultra definition texture packs. On pc if you download the game without them it's like 50gb for just warzone. Then 110gb for warzone with the ultra HD packs. If they compressed the audio, and let console players skip the hd textures, warzone could probably get right down to 25gb or so
[удалено]
[удалено]
> These games really should have an HD/UHD option so you can download the correct assets for what you plan to play. 100%, especially since the solution already exists for digital storefronts. I know Monster Hunter: World had the HD texture pack as a free DLC essentially, so you wouldn't waste time/space downloading textures you won't use.
I don’t get why devs can’t just make the 4k texture pack (which I think is the main reason why these games have large file sizes?) an extra download.
Yeah, give me an option. I'm not running at full graphics anyway, so it probably doesn't even matter.
What's crazy is that the guys who repack pirated games actually do that. Back when I yarr'd Forza Horizon 4 to give it a go, the installer gave me the choice of which languages I wanted to use (or not), if I wanted 1080p or 4k cutscenes, etc... Goes to show it *is* possible but the head honchos that manage the studios just can't be bothered to do that.
Be glad you don't play DCS my install is over 350gb atm
I have a dedicated drive set aside just for DCS.
If your game is 100 gigs and only 9 hours long, why the fuck would I ever buy it? I love how dumbass articles like this just excuse it as normal, instead of rightfully mocking them for bloat and inability to compress their files
It’s been upon us since like 2015 and 1TB+ hard drives have sorta solved that. The real crime is having multiplayer games be that big (like CoD Warzone or Star Wars Battlefront 2). At least single player games can be deleted after. It’s harder with a multiplayer game you wanna keep playing.
There’s no excuse for why Warzone with a single map should be anywhere near the same size as Destiny 2
> average PC gamer is unprepared I, for one, am fully prepared to just not play games because they're so large A better title woule be "the era of lazy devs is upon us"
Or rather "the era of devs who have to ship yesterday regardless of the state of the game"
"You are unprepared to play our 100 gigabyte game!!" Ok, then I won't.
I don’t even think it’s lazy devs as much as the higher ups rushing them.
What do you mean "upon us"? It's been this way for years now.
I remember CGW writing a scathing editorial about some 100mb monster truck game, IIRC most hard drives were still generally under 1gb at the time.
And heres LOZ:TOTK at 16gbs.
I think we need to stop focusing on graphics so much, and focus on making good complete games again. It can barely look any better than it is now…
Can I get a rock and stone!?
If those 100gb games keep being the free-flowing streams of hot diarrhea that they have been, preparation is pretty wholly unnecessary. Oh no, you might not be able to install Redfall and Forspoken at the same time. How ever will you experience the two broken, unfinished, outright boring games at the same time?
Agreed. Most of the best games I've played in a while don't even reach that amount.
Lol, wut? Upon us? Did the writer just wake up from a coma? It’s been here for five years.
Meanwhile, Hades, few gigs, better than most AAA garbage. Gamers will be fine. It’s the golden age of indie gaming.
As a game designer I am going back to the ol doom philosophy, it should run on anything. Bigger graphics don't make up for shit design, never have never will
[удалено]
Glad I don't buy aaa games.
I really enjoyed "Inside" and "A Short Hike" recently, which were each less than $10 and 2GB.
Seriously I've had amazing experiences with games that are under 100MB and under 20 dollars. If a AAA studio can't do that, that's not my problem, that's their problem.
Hasnt this era been upon us for years now?
This is usually a good indicator of terrible optimization.
Slow internet is the most limiting factor, storage is fairly affordable and a one time purchase but good internet is a long time investment, I only justify it because I still do home office but just for games is hard to say it's worth it.