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
Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose
I’ve vowed never to pre-order, period.
Or at least until there are solid reviews, which was what I did with ToTK.
Gaming companies have to earn their money from me every single time.
Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.
I’ve spent like 5 hours tweaking & compiling shaders in TLoU. lol
And it took 1-2 months for it to be in a playable state.No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it’s in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.
It’s the best selling game on steam facepalm
What is?
I’ll be playing it via GamePass and can try to report back once I have some hours under my belt in it.
it is on gamepass
I’ll just delete the large anti-preorder manifesto I was typing lol. Not that it doesn’t remain, just not for this game for me in particular.
I might if I didn’t just get BG3. I’ll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I’ve seen about the scale and what the game is is what I’ve been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn’t perfect and I didn’t love FO4, but it’s in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda’s world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it’s just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can’t exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don’t care.
I get the don’t preorder principle, but it’s on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it’s extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
I want to play it, but finding 120gb for Baldur’s Gate 3 was hard enough, so I’m going to have to pass until I can afford a bigger hard drive.
I’m pretty sure bethesda said playing starfield with a hard drive isn’t great 1tb SSDs aren’t too expensive anymore I’d really recommend moving away from a hard drive
Ah, yeah, I was using hard drive as a catch-all term. My laptop only holds M.2 drives. I’m old, it’s all hard drives to me. =P
ah ok
I definitely support the hypothesis that calling all storage drives hard drives is an old curmudgeon thing 😅 I’ve been doing computer nerdery for way over 30 years, and a hard drive is a hard drive even if it doesn’t have spinny disks in it
SSD’s are hard!
I don’t know when I became my mother. It happened so gradually I barely even noticed.
I think we all swear to ourselves that we won’t grow up to be like those old people who seem to cling to the past.
Then one day you find yourself going “well it’s a hard drive to me, I don’t care what it should be called”
Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.
Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?
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A 1tb Steam Deck-sized NVMe drive is about 120 bucks right now. Not cheap. But not insanely prices either.
Huh I always thought “hard drive” was the umbrella category, and SSDs and spinny disk drives are subcategories.
I think storage or storage drive is the umbrella term these days. “Hard drive” was always short for “Hard Disk Drive” (which was named in comparison to Floppy Disk Drive) but since it was the only type of drive used for non-volatile internal storage for a good 20 years or so, it became a catch-all term. These days, many people understand there’s two different kinds and a lot of systems have both, so hard drive is becoming recognized to mean the spinning disks; as opposed to SSD, which is now an umbrella term incorporating 2.5" SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe, which are all Solid State Drives but different combinations of interfaces and form factors.
I’ve been seeing both recently. I’ve opted to err on the same side and just make it clear when I’m talking about spinning rust versus solid state.
Nah, the “SS” and “HD” bits refers to how each storage disk reads data. HDDs use hard metal disks to read & write data, hence it got the misnomer hard disk drive. SSDs use solid state flash memory to read & write data, hence it being called a solid state drive.
If you want the general category, you’d want to say “storage drive” specifically since if you say “drive”, that can also refer to an optical drive (AKA the CD slot) or a USB drive (AKA flash/thumb drives).
The classic, computer science term for all of these devices is “secondary storage”, if anyone’s looking for a way to confuse people briefly before explaining that you mean “hard drives, SSDs, etc.”
M2 pcie 4 drives are getting pretty cheap recently. I got a 2tb one for 100 with a heat sink on sale. My main from Kingston was 70 with 1tb
You do realize storage drives aren’t exactly expensive?
Not expensive, but it’s another expense that not everyone can drop immediately.
For most it would be a choice of upgrading to a new drive or getting two games.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
Have a low-medium texture download/install option. It’s time!
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I think you would be surprised. 1080p gaming is very much alive & 1080p gamers don’t need ultra high rez textures. I would certainly love to use this option. Sometimes people would even prioritize their data plan over graphics, because not everyone is so obsessed with graphics.
Especially if at download it was explained to users they won’t see a difference at 1080p, then even Steam & GoG could save some bandwidth. (plus it would be environmentally friendly)
Data Plan? Who’s home internet has data limits on 2023?
I game on 1440p, but I only have an 8GB card. A medium textures download option would be amazing. It was nice that the D4 beta had high res textures as an optional extra download.
8GB is still quite a bit though.
can these subpar
doubletriple a games stop not compressing and optimising their shit again, and not dumping all of their over compensating textures and files on us? no?..okay…I think this is Compressed. Remember 4K Textures are a lot of data.
with how this game looks, i refuse to believe that that amounts to that many gb of data (u sure thats 4k?)
Do we have any sort of information on how big the Shattered Space Story Expansion is supposedly going to be? Because 30 bucks extra seems excessive, especially when the game is already 70 bucks. Kinda feels like they just want to lure you with the early access, which will likely be a hot mess anyway.
