cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/2277558
On PC, the game is 139.84 GB. On console, it’s 100.19 GB for Standard or 117.07 GB for the Premium Edition
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/2277558
On PC, the game is 139.84 GB. On console, it’s 100.19 GB for Standard or 117.07 GB for the Premium Edition
Not really the place for it, but why do some people still get so annoyed about the size of games these days?
If you want games to continue improving then the file sizes are going to increase. Maybe devs could do more, but at the same time it’s just a fact that high res textures and larger scale games need more space.
Not everyone has large SSDs with space to spare to play multiple games, it seems like it would be pretty straight forward to have HD texture pack downloadable as DLC or something like Skyrim had back in the day, I wonder why more devs don’t do that? That would give players a choice of which to use.
Requires even more work and even more budget. I understand the problem but it has always been there. There are people now who can’t afford 1tb and there were people 20 years ago who couldn’t afford 50gb when that was the equivalent. This won’t ever go away. And it’s fault by consumers who expect bigger and better things for less and less money. You can only optimize so much on your budget. I still understand this is a problem it’s just not one that will get solved anytime soon, which is a shame.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want games to keep improving, at least, not in that way. It doesn’t mean anything to me that the game includes ultraHD textures and looks stunning on an 8K monitor because I’m still rocking a 3070 with a 1080 120 Hz. The fact that it takes them three years to make a game look this good, which is meaningless to a majority of gamers who can’t afford that kind of hardware, is especially frustrating. And now they’re telling us for the pleasure of waiting so long for them to put the finishing touches on what is effectively marketing material, I have to reserve not just 100+ GB, but all that space on an SSD because the game loads too damn slow otherwise? That’s like an eighth of the available space on your average m.2 drive, for one game, for something most people won’t even be able to enjoy because their hardware just isn’t made for that kind of output.
I don’t want sixteen times the detail, I want an optimized game with serviceable assets and a gameplay loop that doesn’t feel like a second job. And granted, this is getting beyond the graphics argument, but I like games that aren’t afraid of not appealing to the broadest audience. I want my Fallout in Space to have more than four dialog options that all point the same direction. I want to make meaningful choices and play a character that has real opinions and can act accordingly, instead of endless modifiers on the gear of a voice-acted talking doll that exists to service a mostly linear plot. I don’t want F4, I want FNV. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the reviews come out and it ends up being as meaningful as I want it to be, but I’m not holding my breath, and in all likelihood I’m not jumping through the hardware hoops to play a game I probably won’t like.
Fallout 3 released two hardware generations ago at around 8GB. Fallout 4 released last gen and sits at around 25GB. One generation later, Starfield is launching at ~140GB - almost 6x the file size of the previous generation.
I can’t speak for everybody, but my PC storage didn’t jump to 6x capacity in that amount of time, and my download speeds didn’t get 6x faster. But I imagine that’s why it’s concerning to some people.
Even just going by console standards, we’re looking at only a jump of 2x capacity between the Xbox One and Xbox Series X - or exactly the same if you have a Series S. It takes up over 20% of the storage Series S in just one game - with a mandatory install, unspecified patch sizes, impending DLC, etc.
Obviously there’s a discussion to be had of WHY the games are increasing exponentially like that, but on the surface that’s likely where the bulk of the frustration comes from.
Isn’t the size of your PC storage entirely user controlable? If you want 6x the memory you had in 2008 when F3 came out you could have it. The Xbox model at the time came with a 20gb hard drive on the standard model and 120gb for an Elite. So they’ve definitely exponentially grown to 512gb/1tb this gen.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There’s no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn’t.
That’s before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I’m guessing hasn’t disappeared yet.
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That’s why I mentioned languages, too. I’m not saying that it’s bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they’re not going to be used.
It’s possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don’t care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users’s time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative “trim the fat” branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn’t high to do.
I had thought that at least Microsoft’s plan was to for allow their cloud infrastructure to handle background loading processes so that there didn’t need to be such giant file sizes and so developers could have more computing power to work with.
Whatever happened to that?
All consumers want it fast, want it cheap, want it good, want it on their machine, want it maintained in perpetuity, want it small, and want it to load quickly. Nevermind that a number of those are diametrically opposed ideals.
Yeah, people bitching like “nobody needs those big ass textures and high quality uncompressed audio.” Maybe you don’t need it, but high quality, textures are one of the easiest ways to improve graphic quality without putting that much load on the GPU. And I still rip my CDs as FLACs, so I want good audio quality in my games as well.
You really want lossless audio in games? Do you know how big FLACs are in comparison to OGGs? Could most people really hear the difference? Keep in mind the quality of the average headset or desktop speakers. I don’t think any games store lossless audio. If they did, I’d bet they would be much, much bigger.
Actually… no, you’re completely right. That’s why I just wrote “good audio quality”, whatever that means. I actually read in some of those “why are games so big today” posts that people suggested that game devs don’t compress their audio files enough. Some people don’t get that this would come at a cost.
The average gamer might play with pretty shitty headsets but I think developers should go a little bit further than that and also satisfy enthusiasts. Up to a certain degree of course. That’s why I think it’s completely reasonable to demand ultra wide support or the physics not breaking above 60 fps.
This seems to be a point across all media at the moment, people watching/listening on sub-par equipment then complaining because the content is designed for higher quality gear.
“This film was too dark on my laptop screen” when it’s designed for a HDR enabled screen, “Nolan’s sound was mangled though my TV speakers” when it’s designed for at least a decent DTS set up. Etc. The same thing now seems to have infected games, “why is this 2023 game not designed for my 2018 rig and it’s limitations”.