Insane disc space required by AAA games

[RhombusHatesYou]

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

Personally I have this exact same problem as you except that my internet is 100MB/sec, no I am serious. If I'm lucky Steam's download speed is 2MB/sec

I think part of the problem is that telecommmunication speeds (including internet) are measured by the bit so a 100Mb/s connection is the equivalent of 12.5MB/s when measured in bytes, and if I remember correctly Steam shows downloads as bytes not bits. It can be a bit confusing, especially when advertisers and the like don't give a monkeys about using the right notation for the unit of measurement in question.

To get 100MB/s internet, you would need to live in one of the very few areas offering full 24 channel DOCSIS 3.0 connections or are commercially trialing Gigabit internet tech.

 

[Supernova1138]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

The reason they got big was because the new consoles have BluRay drives, so they can inflate the games to 50GB now. Developers are lazy with their ports, and probably decided it's not worth the effort to compress the files for the PC version for those who do have slow internet connections. If you have a slow internet connection, all you can do is go back to buying physical games, or just get used to waiting 24 hours or more to play.

 

[chadachada123]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

It's not just this, either. AAA developers have just given up on the technical aspects of games. Horrible, horrible optimization (not to mention the bugs).

It is, truly, the golden age for PC gamers, so long as you stay the hell away from AAA games.

 

[DrOswald]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

The basic reason amounts to storage is cheap, processing is expensive. Decompression of resources, audio especially, in real time requires a lot of processor power which is just not practical in a high performance application. Therefore this processing time is pushed to the loading. This is why back on the Xbox 360 we had such atrocious load times (Mass effect elevators anyone?) The console did not have guaranteed storage and a very small amount of space on the DVD, so The game data was compressed on the DVD and then decompressed when it was anticipated it would be needed.

This is one of the reasons League of Legends has a 5 gb foot print but every game starts with 90 seconds or more of loading.

So, general rule: storage is cheap, processing expensive. So you can have a processor heavy solution (compressed files) or a storage heavy solution (uncompressed files.) Which do you choose? The answer is obvious: The cheap solution, the storage solution.

Also, most games do come down compressed and are decompressed on install. I don't know of any large footprint games that don't do this. For example, titan fall had a 50 gb install, but you only downloaded like 15 gb.

 

[Rozalia1]

Seems perfectly fine for myself as my internet is incredibly fast and has no cap, I also possess so many platforms that any wait doesn't matter.

For those that have problems I understand they live in areas where there is no good options and all that... but may I suggest discs?

 

[Supernova1138]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

The basic reason amounts to storage is cheap, processing is expensive. Decompression of resources, audio especially, in real time requires a lot of processor power which is just not practical in a high performance application. Therefore this processing time is pushed to the loading. This is why back on the Xbox 360 we had such atrocious load times (Mass effect elevators anyone?) The console did not have guaranteed storage and a very small amount of space on the DVD, so The game data was compressed on the DVD and then decompressed when it was anticipated it would be needed.

This is one of the reasons League of Legends has a 5 gb foot print but every game starts with 90 seconds or more of loading.

So, general rule: storage is cheap, processing expensive. So you can have a processor heavy solution (compressed files) or a storage heavy solution (uncompressed files.) Which do you choose? The answer is obvious: The cheap solution, the storage solution.

Also, most games do come down compressed and are decompressed on install. I don't know of any large footprint games that don't do this. For example, titan fall had a 50 gb install, but you only downloaded like 15 gb.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 42 GB download off of Steam, and takes up 43.5 GB on my hard drive, so not everyone is compressing their downloads it seems. I haven't played anything else that came out this year, so I'm not sure how many other publishers are compressing their downloads, but it certainly isn't a universal practice.

 

[Vivi22]

more content is required with greater sound and image files needed.

You mean like uncompressed data? Okay. Thank you, like we need it anyway.

Uncompressed data results in faster load times and better quality audio and visuals. I could not imagine why anyone would purposely want lower quality sound and textures in their games.

Many people in the world still have bandwidth caps. Many of those people would blow right past them if they had to download games that are 30+ gigabytes. And honestly, even a marginal amount of compression could be used to reduce file sizes somewhat and no one would ever notice. And I mean that in all seriousness as someone who does care about audio and picture quality: most people would never actually notice. And the performance benefits are marginal at best. Particularly in a world where RAM is as cheap as it is, and most of the time games spend showing stupid unskippable company logos or sitting in a menu before loading the actual game could easily be spent also decompressing files either based on what is most commonly used, or what is most likely to be necessary based on the last save point in a game.

Christ, I've got 16GB of RAM and I don't even consider that to be a lot. I know Windows isn't eating up that much, and neither is Steam itself, so how about we load things the game will need into RAM as much as possible?

 

[Haerthan]

If we don't have massive games, how can we possible appreciate TEH GRAFFIX

If you ever buy Ubisoft, make sure that it isnt from STEAM. Because Uplay will fuck you up. If you download from Uplay your DL speeds will be atrocious. I had a download that came in with BYTES, not kilobytes or megabytes, BUT FREAKING BYTES. So yea, stay away from Uplay. That is the second thing I got to murder. First one being the Captcha from the Escapist. Damn that bot-stopping clanker is sentient sometimes I swear

I always thought Steam's downloads were a function of Steam's service. My downloads cap out at about 2 MB/sec on a good day, with a 30 MB/sec download speed.

Yea I know. Steam goes to 2MB/s for me as well. Downloads are done in a day at the most, even earlier. So yea. Steam awesome, Uplay bleh.

 

[Vivi22]

If we don't have massive games, how can we possible appreciate TEH GRAFFIX

If you ever buy Ubisoft, make sure that it isnt from STEAM. Because Uplay will fuck you up. If you download from Uplay your DL speeds will be atrocious. I had a download that came in with BYTES, not kilobytes or megabytes, BUT FREAKING BYTES. So yea, stay away from Uplay. That is the second thing I got to murder. First one being the Captcha from the Escapist. Damn that bot-stopping clanker is sentient sometimes I swear

I always thought Steam's downloads were a function of Steam's service. My downloads cap out at about 2 MB/sec on a good day, with a 30 MB/sec download speed.

It is possible for other services running in the background to hog the bandwidth and throttle downloads. I can't download from Steam at a decent rate at all if I have my torrent client open. Doesn't even matter if I'm not actually downloading any torrents.

But Steam itself can allow you to download faster than 2.0 MB/sec. I know this because earlier today I was pulling 5.0 MB/sec. It will depend in part on your location and the location of the Steam servers, but ISP's also frequently overstate what your max download speed will be. In my experience, whatever number they tell me I'll get I usually get actual speeds of 1/10th what was advertised at most.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Okay people, let's settle this

Internet connection speeds are in bits per second but Steam shows download speeds as bytes per second. If you want to compare your connection speed to your Steam download speed, take the number Steam gives you and MULTIPLY IT BY EIGHT (that converts bytes/sec into bits/sec).


Bytes to bits is N*8, bits to bytes is N/8.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 42 GB download off of Steam, and takes up 43.5 GB on my hard drive, so not everyone is compressing their downloads it seems.

There are currently 2 schools of thought on that. The first theorises that megatextures don't compress well. The second school theorises that Bethesda (the publisher not the developer) always forget to do something and this time it was compression... but at least it wasn't QA like they usually forget.

 

[CommanderZx2]

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 42 GB download off of Steam, and takes up 43.5 GB on my hard drive, so not everyone is compressing their downloads it seems.

There are currently 2 schools of thought on that. The first theorises that megatextures don't compress well. The second school theorises that Bethesda (the publisher not the developer) always forget to do something and this time it was compression... but at least it wasn't QA like they usually forget.

The megatextures are heavily compressed already to get down to that size of 42GB. For example Rage uses megatextures and has an install size of 25GB, however the uncompressed files for the game is about a TB. The reason the texture files are so large is that there's no repeated textures in the environment, everything is one large image file that has been painted like a canvas. All other games use a limited selection of textures instead to tile over environments and so the file size is much smaller.

 

[secretkeeper12]

It's just arbitrary since the benefits are so miniscule that they might as well be non-existent.

I downloaded Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is about 25 GB if I remember correctly, just to find out that the text language in the game is set to Polish and there's no option to change it.

 

[DrOswald]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

The basic reason amounts to storage is cheap, processing is expensive. Decompression of resources, audio especially, in real time requires a lot of processor power which is just not practical in a high performance application. Therefore this processing time is pushed to the loading. This is why back on the Xbox 360 we had such atrocious load times (Mass effect elevators anyone?) The console did not have guaranteed storage and a very small amount of space on the DVD, so The game data was compressed on the DVD and then decompressed when it was anticipated it would be needed.

This is one of the reasons League of Legends has a 5 gb foot print but every game starts with 90 seconds or more of loading.

So, general rule: storage is cheap, processing expensive. So you can have a processor heavy solution (compressed files) or a storage heavy solution (uncompressed files.) Which do you choose? The answer is obvious: The cheap solution, the storage solution.

Also, most games do come down compressed and are decompressed on install. I don't know of any large footprint games that don't do this. For example, titan fall had a 50 gb install, but you only downloaded like 15 gb.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 42 GB download off of Steam, and takes up 43.5 GB on my hard drive, so not everyone is compressing their downloads it seems. I haven't played anything else that came out this year, so I'm not sure how many other publishers are compressing their downloads, but it certainly isn't a universal practice.

The Titanfall download is listed as 50 GB. But if you actually measure the network activity it is far less. So that might be what is actually happening in the case of Wolfenstein: The New Order. The common practice is to report the download size as the same size as the install size even though they are typically very different. The extra 1.5 GB is probably extra stuff (like patches or free DLC resources) that was not factored into that initial download.

Or, like Rhombus said, Bethesda is just stupid and incompetent. That is a very real possibility. It certainly explains Fallout 3.

Edit: Not that I am saying the practice is universal. Most smaller games (2 GB or less) would never do this and I am sure there are at least a few developers who would not do this step for no reason I can figure out. And Bethesda is on the top of my list of developers who might not actually know what a computer is.

 

[Supernova1138]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

The basic reason amounts to storage is cheap, processing is expensive. Decompression of resources, audio especially, in real time requires a lot of processor power which is just not practical in a high performance application. Therefore this processing time is pushed to the loading. This is why back on the Xbox 360 we had such atrocious load times (Mass effect elevators anyone?) The console did not have guaranteed storage and a very small amount of space on the DVD, so The game data was compressed on the DVD and then decompressed when it was anticipated it would be needed.

This is one of the reasons League of Legends has a 5 gb foot print but every game starts with 90 seconds or more of loading.

So, general rule: storage is cheap, processing expensive. So you can have a processor heavy solution (compressed files) or a storage heavy solution (uncompressed files.) Which do you choose? The answer is obvious: The cheap solution, the storage solution.

Also, most games do come down compressed and are decompressed on install. I don't know of any large footprint games that don't do this. For example, titan fall had a 50 gb install, but you only downloaded like 15 gb.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 42 GB download off of Steam, and takes up 43.5 GB on my hard drive, so not everyone is compressing their downloads it seems. I haven't played anything else that came out this year, so I'm not sure how many other publishers are compressing their downloads, but it certainly isn't a universal practice.

The Titanfall download is listed as 50 GB. But if you actually measure the network activity it is far less. So that might be what is actually happening in the case of Wolfenstein: The New Order. The common practice is to report the download size as the same size as the install size even though they are typically very different. The extra 1.5 GB is probably extra stuff (like patches or free DLC resources) that was not factored into that initial download.

Or, like Rhombus said, Bethesda is just stupid and incompetent. That is a very real possibility. It certainly explains Fallout 3.

Edit: Not that I am saying the practice is universal. Most smaller games (2 GB or less) would never do this and I am sure there are at least a few developers who would not do this step for no reason I can figure out. And Bethesda is on the top of my list of developers who might not actually know what a computer is.

Oh, I'm sure the download was actually that big, it took me about 20 hours to complete, which is about right for 42 GB given my Internet connection's rather slow top speed. For whatever reason, Bethesda did not compress the game at all for the download. Guess it's a good thing I don't have a bandwidth cap, I just have to wait a day if I want to play anything new now.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I am sure there are at least a few developers who would not do this step for no reason I can figure out.

Yes but that's because you're old enough to remember installers that gave you options during installation beyond what drive to put stuff on.

 

[Supernova1138]

I am sure there are at least a few developers who would not do this step for no reason I can figure out.

Yes but that's because you're old enough to remember installers that gave you options during installation beyond what drive to put stuff on.

Ah yes, the good old days when hard drive space was at such a premium you could do a minimal install and stream most of the game off the CD, and God help you if you had a slow CD-ROM drive and a hard disk that had less capacity than a CD-ROM.

 

[Someone Depressing]

Yeah, insane. My internet's pretty terrible, and my laptop's maybe lower-middle range if one if being charitable in its assessment. So I've pretty much given up on AAA games now, not because of the fact that they suck (they do) or that they're walking money-swindling machines (they are), but because I can't damn play them.

Oh well. I will always have indie games.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I am sure there are at least a few developers who would not do this step for no reason I can figure out.

Yes but that's because you're old enough to remember installers that gave you options during installation beyond what drive to put stuff on.

Ah yes, the good old days when hard drive space was at such a premium you could do a minimal install and stream most of the game off the CD, and God help you if you had a slow CD-ROM drive and a hard disk that had less capacity than a CD-ROM.

My first CD drive was an honest-to-fucking-god x1 speed. It was magnificent. It could play audio CDs without powering up the entire system.

 

[asdfen]

games always used whatever was the max available on medium that is currently wildly in use. before new consoles it was dual layer dvd (8 gigs) with very few games going for multi disk approach now it considered that everyone has access to that is bluray 50 gb so most of the games in foreseeable future will be around 50GB.

I do however agree that going from 8gb to 50gb hasnt really improved much if anything an is a major annoyance since its first 50 gb install file then the actual install and what we have is a single game taking up 100 GB of HDD. HDD space is cheap but not that cheap. The games of 2014 just have bogus inflation of that 50GB space usage without any tangible benefits to PC users unless that have extreme PC specs insane quality display and audio systems as well as eyes and ears capable of appreciating the output which would be a very small portion of the populous.