Expect 100 GB Install Size, 6 GB Patches For Star Citizen

[Qvar]

They are being cynical if the complain about how this game won't deliver on it's promises AND how this game will take too much HDD space that will obviously be used on delivering on said promises.

 

[fix-the-spade]

But seriously, who is going to download that in an age where the majority of us still have caps? I know I'm not even considering it now (I was before) and I have a 250GB cap, about as high as they get.

Move to Europe, our internet isn't stuck in 2005.

I don't see what the fuss is.

Titanfall is 48GB(!)
Battlefield 4 is about 60GB with expansions.
Advanced Warfare is 45GB for the base game.
So two to two and a half times the size of a middling FPS doesn't sound bad to me.
Multi GB patches and DLC are already the norm, it says more about ISPs than the game that this is a problem for anyone in the western world.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

That's kind of an issue. I'm not heavily invested in the whole Elite vs SC argument, but I will say that this is pretty much the reason that E is always online (besides the fact that it's an MMO anyway) because 400 billion systems is a lot of data, so it can be downloaded as needed. At least I think that's how it works, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

The other reason I prefer E is because it exists. Star citizen to me is seeming almost Molyneux-esque in what it promises, and I'd be surprised if even half of that comes to fruition. Don't get me wrong. If SC turns out to be all they say, I'd happily spend up many pounds and hundreds of GB of space for it, but I doubt it will.

 

[Saulkar]

This is why I keep up to date on updates but sometimes this shit can become corrupted then a new download and installation is needed. Downloading the game in its entirety at the moment is a ten to twelve hour procedure on my five megabit connection. At least I do not have to worry about data-caps.

 

[shrekfan246]

And what is the problem? Storage space is cheap, and the people who want to play this game will probably have the internet speeds required for it.

Except the ones who don't. As other people have pointed out, a great many people still are forced into internet connections that have monthly caps on usage (most of the time said caps are even below 100 GB), and even people who aren't capped can have terrible speeds (like myself; it would literally take me the better part of a full week to download this, assuming I was getting full speeds the entire time).

Being the fault of the ISPs doesn't make it any less relevant a thing to consider. Good for the people who won't have any issues with this, but a lot of people still will.

Reading the comments in this thread reminds me of why I don't want to go back to the States. My first thought upon reading that was "that might take an hour or two to download. Maybe I'll watch a movie while I wait."

I don't get it living IN the States. Like, no, my down speed isn't amazing, but leaving it on overnight...

Either way, I don't get the surprise. WoW uses low-poly everything and is upward of 30 Gigs in size. This is a Space Sim that has actual fidelity in its art assets. Really not something that came from left field. It's impressive more than anything else.

WoW is also just over a decade old, with four expansion packs. And yet they've managed to keep the game from ballooning much beyond 30 GB over all of that time, despite it getting consistently larger and receiving improved assets.

I don't see what the fuss is.

Titanfall is 48GB(!)
Battlefield 4 is about 60GB with expansions.
Advanced Warfare is 45GB for the base game.
So two to two and a half times the size of a middling FPS doesn't sound bad to me.
Multi GB patches and DLC are already the norm, it says more about ISPs than the game that this is a problem for anyone in the western world.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think those install sizes are ridiculously overblown as well, especially considering the amount of actual content each game contains. And multi-GB patches are extremely obnoxious, because it means that when I get the feeling to play something that needs to update before I'm allowed to play, I have to spend hours waiting and by the time it's finished I probably won't feel like playing it anymore.

 

[InfernalPaladin]

Cool, on my 600kb/s download speed that will only take me around....

2 days.

oh.

Ah well, i'm an Elite guy anyway

 

[fix-the-spade]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think those install sizes are ridiculously overblown as well, especially considering the amount of actual content each game contains.

I agree, but it's a symptom of the demand for HD-everything. If we all agreed to play on 2005-7 era graphics forever install sizes would drop dramatically, but graphics are still the main selling tool of new games, so we're stuck with it.

 

[Coruptin]

Well Chris Robert's middle name is ambition. And whilst the cynics fold their arms in their stalwart hope it'll fail, he and the rest of his team are actually getting on with it.

100gb might be a little hard to explain to the billpayers,. mind.

Actually, I am optimistically waiting for this game to fail. This game has the opulent bloated budgets of the AAA industry added with the over-ambition and lack of restraints of indie development. It exemplifies the worst mentalities of the the industry and having it succeed would do more harm than it would do good in the long run.

 

[dtgenshiken7]

People who are complaining about the download size are missing an important factor- You can pause the download. If you really want to play, let it take something like 20 gigs over a month to first install, and when it has to patch, do so manually at the end of the month if you have the data, or the start if you don't. It's inefficient, but better than blowing 100gb in one friggen' go.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Okay, Chris. I get it. I'll buy a new harddrive for your game.

Just don't hurt my computer! D:

 

[lacktheknack]

Well Chris Robert's middle name is ambition. And whilst the cynics fold their arms in their stalwart hope it'll fail, he and the rest of his team are actually getting on with it.

100gb might be a little hard to explain to the billpayers,. mind.

Actually, I am optimistically waiting for this game to fail. This game has the opulent bloated budgets of the AAA industry added with the over-ambition and lack of restraints of indie development. It exemplifies the worst mentalities of the the industry and having it succeed would do more harm than it would do good in the long run.[/quote

The two mentalities cancel each other out. If you're over-budgeting, be over-ambitious. When you have one and not the other, that's where problems happen. I'm all for AAA getting kicked into higher ambition.

I still can't play Star Citizen in the foreseeable future, but if it succeeds, I'm OK with that.

 

[Emanuele Ciriachi]

I remember when I played on my 286 @12 Mhz, Wing Commander took roughly 25% of my incredibly expensive 20MB hard drive.
Wing Commander II the next year took about half of the "new and improved" 40MB drive of my 386 @40Mhz.

1 TB drives are dirt cheap compared to people's average income today - I don't see how the size is going to be a problem.

What concerns me the most is how the hell are they going to handle the massive amount of data required to synchronise the status of the multi-crew ships, their systems, subsystems, and all the PC/NPC on board. I'm afraid this will significantly limit the maximum amount of ships in the same instance.

 

[Zhit]

So a new game is coming along that will require lots of folks to upgrade their hardware to play? Nothing new--been happening in the gaming world for decades. Folks complaining about the size of downloads remind me of the modem/isdn days when broadband was just getting rolled out.

But the vision of the developers isn't to create a game that runs of all the hardware Best Buy has sold over the last decade. Star Citizen is meant to push all hardware to its current limits. Folks are running liquid cooled, 16GB rigs with dual 290's and the like. Star Citizen won't be for everyone--but I suspect those able to afford to play will have a great time.

On a side note--if you are having bandwidth or data cap problems--why not take a page from the old modem days? Nothing says you can only have one broadband account. Multi-hone your broadband with a second cable account or maybe think about DSL or even rooting and tethering your cellphone.

 

[TwiZtah]

Looks like this won't be the Eve killer after all (not that the mechanics of the game ever made that a possibility anyway).

But seriously, who is going to download that in an age where the majority of us still have caps? I know I'm not even considering it now (I was before) and I have a 250GB cap, about as high as they get.

No, that is the US. I have never even heard of data caps, ever.

 

[Ark of the Covetor]

That would take me a day to download... It's doable, and I don't have to worry about a cap, but why is it so big? I get that the game has amazing graphics, but isn't a fairly sizable portion of the game just space?

If the game turns out to be amazing (I'm doubtful) I will certainly pick it up, but it really sucks for the people who have to deal with download limits. It just seems like a bit of a middle finger to what could very well be a large portion of their backers. But hey, they've already got their money so that doesn't really matter.

Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but I tend to assume the worst about pretty much every game developer.

On the contrary, I see this as them doing exactly what they should be doing for their backers: making the best game possible. This is supposed to be a PC game for PC gamers, no fucking compromises, and if people actually backed the project in the expectation they'd be able to play something running on a heavily modified version of the Crysis Engine on the decrepit fucking Difference Engine they use to play WoW, well, a fool and his money are soon parted as they say.

SC will have multiple large landing locations on planets, all of which you can set down on and walk around in FPS mode, the same for space stations, not to mention the various PoI locations where you can go EVA and explore in zero-G. Some of the larger ships are as large as an FPS level, and all the multiplayer ships plus a few of the singleplayer ones have an interior that you can move around in while flying in space. Not to mention all the "maps" for the ingame VR simulator modes that let you just play pew-pew in FPS/your ship.

SC is two or three big modern games rolled into one, why is it a shock to people that it needs two or three big games' worth of assets?

 

[Coruptin]

The two mentalities cancel each other out. If you're over-budgeting, be over-ambitious. When you have one and not the other, that's where problems happen. I'm all for AAA getting kicked into higher ambition.

I still can't play Star Citizen in the foreseeable future, but if it succeeds, I'm OK with that.

And here, we already see the damage this game is doing.

Over-ambition is reigned in by a frugal budget and release schedule. It forces people to come up with creative solutions instead of say...

RSI Comm Link [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14568-Design-The-New-Damage-System]
Two other areas we wanted to improve on were the time it takes our artist to create the numerous damage states for each part of the ship, and the hefty memory cost these meshes come with, which could prove to be a problem as we scale up the game. The reason the damage states are so labour intensive is that each ship has over ten main parts, and each of these requires five damage states to represent the different levels of damage, then each of these requires up to five simplified meshes that we use when they?re further from the camera to save performance. This equates to over 200 meshes per ship!

this, this is an overtly indulgent budget feeding off of ambition. It's a "let's throw money at our problems!" mentality.

 

[Remus]

732GB free of 1.81TB....and nearly 28 hour DL time at optimal speed for my connection. Hmm, think I'll still get it but I only recently bought my current HD. I may get a dedicated SSD just for this as well.

 

[lacktheknack]

The two mentalities cancel each other out. If you're over-budgeting, be over-ambitious. When you have one and not the other, that's where problems happen. I'm all for AAA getting kicked into higher ambition.

I still can't play Star Citizen in the foreseeable future, but if it succeeds, I'm OK with that.

And here, we already see the damage this game is doing.

Over-ambition is reigned in by a frugal budget and release schedule. It forces people to come up with creative solutions instead of say...

RSI Comm Link [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14568-Design-The-New-Damage-System]
Two other areas we wanted to improve on were the time it takes our artist to create the numerous damage states for each part of the ship, and the hefty memory cost these meshes come with, which could prove to be a problem as we scale up the game. The reason the damage states are so labour intensive is that each ship has over ten main parts, and each of these requires five damage states to represent the different levels of damage, then each of these requires up to five simplified meshes that we use when they?re further from the camera to save performance. This equates to over 200 meshes per ship!

this, this is an overtly indulgent budget feeding off of ambition. It's a "let's throw money at our problems!" mentality.

You have no use for a gaming version of Caligula?

Awww. I was enjoying the ride.

 

[RedDeadFred]

That would take me a day to download... It's doable, and I don't have to worry about a cap, but why is it so big? I get that the game has amazing graphics, but isn't a fairly sizable portion of the game just space?

If the game turns out to be amazing (I'm doubtful) I will certainly pick it up, but it really sucks for the people who have to deal with download limits. It just seems like a bit of a middle finger to what could very well be a large portion of their backers. But hey, they've already got their money so that doesn't really matter.

Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but I tend to assume the worst about pretty much every game developer.

On the contrary, I see this as them doing exactly what they should be doing for their backers: making the best game possible. This is supposed to be a PC game for PC gamers, no fucking compromises, and if people actually backed the project in the expectation they'd be able to play something running on a heavily modified version of the Crysis Engine on the decrepit fucking Difference Engine they use to play WoW, well, a fool and his money are soon parted as they say.

SC will have multiple large landing locations on planets, all of which you can set down on and walk around in FPS mode, the same for space stations, not to mention the various PoI locations where you can go EVA and explore in zero-G. Some of the larger ships are as large as an FPS level, and all the multiplayer ships plus a few of the singleplayer ones have an interior that you can move around in while flying in space. Not to mention all the "maps" for the ingame VR simulator modes that let you just play pew-pew in FPS/your ship.

SC is two or three big modern games rolled into one, why is it a shock to people that it needs two or three big games' worth of assets?

Maybe, but I'll wait until the finished product to decide if it really ends up being that big. There are plenty of huge games out that aren't even a third of this game's size, so yes, I am skeptical. If it does end up being that huge and delivers on all of the things you just mentioned, I will absolutely get the game. Believe me, I want it to be great, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[Doom972]

Looks like this won't be the Eve killer after all (not that the mechanics of the game ever made that a possibility anyway).

But seriously, who is going to download that in an age where the majority of us still have caps? I know I'm not even considering it now (I was before) and I have a 250GB cap, about as high as they get.

I know that data caps are common in Canada and the US, but I'm not sure if it's a global problem. In my country (Israel) data caps only exist for mobile web. Maybe some people from other countries can comment and say if it's common in their countries.