Insane disc space required by AAA games

[Something Amyss]

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.

Yeah, except I'm not running torrents, downloading from other clients or services, or even browsing particularly intensive web pages. I can, however, download off PSN, XBL, and Amazon simultaneously and get better transfer rates from all three while watching HD video on my PC.

 

[xorldain]

I have a fairly sizable library of games, but because of the size of games I was forced to delete games and reinstall as I wanted to play them. So I caved and bought a 4TB hard drive so I could just have them all despite their size.

 

[Recusant]

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?

You may indeed, but it wouldn't solve the problem. Above and beyond the fact that many newer titles aren't available on physical discs, a great many (perhaps even most) major-release games get hit with a multi-gigabyte patch in the first few days. At best it'd lessen the problem.

One thing to remember, though, is that this isn't a new issue- as hard drive sizes ballooned in the late 90's, developers stopped bothering to offer multiple installation sizes; I can't tell you how long it's been since I've seen an option to select that. I remember seeing an article decrying this very phenomenon; noting that the full installation of Diablo 2 took up more than a full gig, and that came out fourteen years ago.

 

[TheArcaneThinker]

This is all due to those shiny graphics which somehow nowadays matter more than the content....

 

[Snotnarok]

As I gathered, it's partly to discourage piracy as the files are far larger and take longer to download vs buying it and installing fast. Most of the data is uncompressed multi-lingual audio, making it cheaper to produce as you just make one version and send it about.
It's infuriating though, Titanfall is VERY large simply due to, as I said the multi-lingual audio which here's the thing. You cannot even select your voice language (last I checked, maybe they changed it) so all those languages you're forced to download and install and you don't even have a choice.

Back when, PC games allowed you to choose how much to install, full, middle and as least as possible. They gave tons of options on what you'd be putting on your HDD. Now? Here's everything, too bad if you don't like it.
I feel sorry for console players who start out with 500GB which will let you have ...around 9 or 8 games? After all those massive patches and DLC.

 

[DoPo]

As I gathered, it's partly to discourage piracy as the files are far larger and take longer to download vs buying it and installing fast.

That...would be the stupidest anti-piracy measure I've heard of. Size inconvenience didn't stop piracy in the dialup days, it didn't stop it after the dialup days and it hasn't even made it inconvenient. RIPs existed to mitigate the size factor but those died out even as size grew a lot. I don't really see how making the games even bigger would make pirates go "Oh, gosh, now I need to buy it".

Especially since it's equally inconveniencing DD service users, of which there are a lot. And since it hasn't really stop them...well, unless there are external circumstances like bad ISPs, we could conclude that it's similarly not going to affect pirates much.

 

[Bad Jim]

Back {then}, PC games allowed you to choose how much to install, full, middle and as least as possible. They gave tons of options on what you'd be putting on your HDD. Now? Here's everything, too bad if you don't like it.

Back then, CD drives were still fast enough that loading from the CD was tolerable. But game size has increased dramatically while the speed of optical media has not. I think if you actually looked at the data files on a modern game you'd struggle to find much that would be acceptable to load at 20MB/sec or however fast it is.

Also, I seem to remember doing full installs for just about everything even when I had a small HD and a fast CD drive. That fast CD drive didn't just make loading from CD tolerable, it also made it nice and fast to uninstall and reinstall games whenever I felt like it. Since the HD was always faster, that's what I did.

That said, you could possibly have a more advanced kind of minimal install in linear games, where the game would keep the immediately accessible content installed but not the content that would take 5 hours of gameplay to reach.

 

[asdfen]

I think the biggest issue most of us have with inflated sizes due to uncompressed audio which imo is just a silly idea for PC game. Todays budget gaming PCs can compress/decompress tens if not hundreds of stereo audio tracks in the background while playing a game without any slowdowns. I also do not know anyone who has speakers/audio card good enough to actually tell the difference between compressed(pro quality) and uncompressed audio.

 

[laggyteabag]

I have a download speed of around 700kb/s normally to around 1mb/s on a good day.

It took me about 12 hours to download Shadow of Mordor. It seems that I am one of the few people in existence who actually buys PC games on disks nowadays, at least if I actually have plans on playing the game on launch day when pre-loading isn't available *cough*Uplay*cough*.

It is rapidly approaching the point where 1TB of storage space just isn't enough anymore. I would really enjoy it if games stopped coming out with 30GB downloads, but it seems like it is here to stay.

 

[BeerTent]

Not exactly bandwidth, but I remember when I was gaming on a computer with 20 MB of space. It was a DOS machine, and it could only fit one game on it at a time. I had to decide which one of my games I wanted to be able to play at any given time, and the uninstall re install process was a pain in the ass, figuring drivers and trying to get games to work.

Also, where do you live that you get 100kb/s? That is just slightly better than dialup. I didn't know you could have internet that bad anymore. Are you sure you don't mean KB/s? There is a really big difference there.

Finally, that is probably the install footprint, not the amount of data you need to download. That is going to be heavily compressed.

TLDR: Get off my lawn youngin.

I remember the 20MB HDD... When me and my brother got one, we were like... "OH MY GAWD! We're NEVER gonna fill this shit!!"

Even now that we've stopped pirating, and are looking at a 8TB RAID enclosure (8TB of space to work with, during said RAID array) We refuse to say those 6 words, even though we're thinking it.

As for internet speeds... Status quo in the western world, I'm afraid. I'm trying to cheat around Bell to do so little as to GET nominal service, let along trying to find out when they have sales that can get the price point anywhere near what it's worth.

 

[J Tyran]

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

My mobile network sucks in my area and I cannot get above 12Mbps despite getting promised more than that.

 

[Azhrarn-101]

This is probably mostly an American problem, rural areas in the US tend to not be hooked up to great internet, and anywhere else you're at the mercy of the telecoms that try to milk you for all you're worth while providing as little service as possible.

As for me, I currently have 90 Mbps Internet, so on Steam I'm usually looking at ~10MB/s or so, so a game taking 40 or so GB of space would take a little over an hour to download, and with a 1TB drive to store the files on storage isn't really an issue either as long as I don't have a crazy number of these huge games installed.

Now on the upload front Americans with proper connections will generally have me at an advantage.
I may get 90 Mbps down, I'm lucky if I hit 9 Mbps up, thankfully I don't make YouTube videos for a living.

As for the games themselves, I own very few of these huge games, I don't game that often, and the latest batch of AAA games hasn't really caught my eye. I do own Wolfenstein: The New Order, but that's about it for recent AAA releases I've bought. I've gotten plenty of smaller independent titles though, as I've found those more interesting in general. Next year I've got Witcher 3 coming up, and a number of Kickstarted RPGs (Numenera and Eternity for a start), those may also be huge, but somehow I doubt that they'll be on that scale.

 

[Clankenbeard]

There was this one time that I tried to install Speedball II by the Bitmap Brothers on my old Tandy 1000EX that had no hard drive. There wasn't enough room. So, I just had to play the game from the 1.44MB 3-1/2" diskette. Load times were ridiculous. The game was great, so it was totally work the wait.

Dang. I see that Steam is now selling Speedball II HD for $10 and it requires 1GB of RAM and 300MB hard drive space?!?!?! WTF? The game is now 200 times larger in size than it was in 1993? I gotta think that coders today are sloppier thanks to higher hardware performance. Damn you sloppy coders!

 

[Optimus6128]

I just read about Titanfall needing so much space because of uncompressed audio files. And that they did this to save CPU speed.
I think this is a lie. You could have realtime audio decompression in a Pentium 1 machine in the late 90s. You can even choose to decompress in memory during loading and then play the uncompressed version during gameplay. Afterall, most other games I know work nicely with compressed audio. I think the technical reason explained is bogus. But I don't know why they have chosen to do it like this. Making the size huge to stop piracy? Or maybe because of deadlines there was no time to convert to compressed audio and change the player code or something?

Other than that, you have Wolfenstein the New order with 45GBs and that's for Megatexture I think. Which doesn't look as good for the user and it's wasteful. All it does is store enormous sizes of textures that gives freedom to artist, no need to tile the same small texture again, but each texel can be individually and uniquely painted. Now this has to be streamed from the HD to the GPU. In Rage it was bad with texture popping and incredibly ugly lowres textures (Imagine the face of a gamer who doesn't understand the technology. He hears "Megatexture" and things he is gonna see texture detail beyond belief. Later on he sees something that looks and performs worse than any other game without this technology). In Wolfenstein they kinda fixed it, but now the texture data is taking huge space on HD. Thus the big size.

Megatexture requiring too much HD made sense, even if not practical for gamers. But uncompressed audio to save CPU is just an excuse.

 

[Optimus6128]

There was this one time that I tried to install Speedball II by the Bitmap Brothers on my old Tandy 1000EX that had no hard drive. There wasn't enough room. So, I just had to play the game from the 1.44MB 3-1/2" diskette. Load times were ridiculous. The game was great, so it was totally work the wait.

Dang. I see that Steam is now selling Speedball II HD for $10 and it requires 1GB of RAM and 300MB hard drive space?!?!?! WTF? The game is now 200 times larger in size than it was in 1993? I gotta think that coders today are sloppier thanks to higher hardware performance. Damn you sloppy coders!

What happens is that modern hardware makes devs sloppier or it makes it easier for you to slip tons of data and not spend time on optimizing.
And it's also the artists. Many artists are used to love making the most detailed models with most detailed textures and be like "Take my 4GB character, that should be fine I guess?". The artist wants to have creative freedom and make spectacular things with the modeler tools without restrictions, thinking kinda WYSIWTF "I'll make this beauty and then I assume your code is gonna run it perfectly!". The coders ask them to tone down the detail, according to the target machine the team or management decides to go for.

Now, if the trend for most modern games is 20 or 30GBs, then the people who did Speedball HD will not think "It's a shame that such a game does not fit in a floppy anymore". They will think instead "Wow! Lot's a space! Do what you want with the assets!!! Even if we put everything in there, it's a small game and 1-4GBs will be nothing compared to the beasts. Most people will be happy with that!"

Other than that, when I first tried to code for an old handheld, the GP32 with 8MB of Ram, I quickly hit the ceiling. At first I was like, why does it crash? Then I realized I should learn to free any object I malloced and not need anymore plus optimize other parts, not use static tables of 10000 elements just to show 100 particles but make dynamic structures, etc. The problem was that before that era I was coding on the PC and doing all sort of unoptimized stuff with the memory without caring. It was huge, you never even thought about it. That's what happens with today with the crazy hardware we have. It makes you loose the track. And I wouldn't even care about Titanfall being 50GBs (besides the joke about audio decompression) because I still have 1TB left.

 

[Snotnarok]

As I gathered, it's partly to discourage piracy as the files are far larger and take longer to download vs buying it and installing fast.

That...would be the stupidest anti-piracy measure I've heard of. Size inconvenience didn't stop piracy in the dialup days, it didn't stop it after the dialup days and it hasn't even made it inconvenient. RIPs existed to mitigate the size factor but those died out even as size grew a lot. I don't really see how making the games even bigger would make pirates go "Oh, gosh, now I need to buy it".

Especially since it's equally inconveniencing DD service users, of which there are a lot. And since it hasn't really stop them...well, unless there are external circumstances like bad ISPs, we could conclude that it's similarly not going to affect pirates much.

A lot of others say the same thing, but I didn't say it's a means to prevent, it's a means to discourage. The easiest method is often the ones some will take. I'm not saying it'd make some rather grab it. Some don't have large bandwith plans either so it can effect them as well.

 

[Flammablezeus]

This all reminds me of when I first got WoW, and it came on 4 CDs. I recently got Warlords of Draenor (the latest expansion for those unfamiliar with WoW) which comes with a full install of the game, although now it takes up 4 DVDs instead of CDs. It just caused me to really reflect on how much gaming has really changed.

 

[Slegiar Dryke]

This exact issue is why I look with disdain at the concept of how digital downloads have, in the industry, forced their way into the frontline instead of buying a boxed copy. It's also partly why I haven't bought a new game in........literally several months, that wasn't a small indie game of some sort or a creative adventure, or something with a lot of replay value (crypt of the necrodancer back in the summer). A: the costs lately have not been justified by the games, and B: the storage "price" gigabyte wise have been laughably ridiculous. Whenever I am capable of buying the system I have my eyes on first, a Wii U, I will be getting all the games I want as full disk copies because it will be 100 times faster than waiting for hundreds of gigabytes to download on my crappy 5mb connection that barely manages that most days........



I mean, hell, some days, I can get a better connection than my home line, by tethering to my phone on my grandfathered unlimited plan with verizon......and we're on the EDGE of the closest towers range. It's pathetic.....


Edit to clarify: my descriptors of game types, I wasn't quite clear. basically the games that aren't super graphics powerhouses or have huge amounts of data heavy assets, but have good gameplay. probably the most power hungry game I've played in recent months has been Firefall, a better version of destiny imho, a fun 3rd person run and gun shooter mmo with loot and at least 16 different battleframe mech suits to run around in, level up, and shoot aliens and, it's free............oh wait, that's what destiny is, minus 13 suits and the free part XD *ducks behind flameproof shield*

 

[Fijiman]

This is why I never download/instal the bigger games. While my internet download speed is pretty good, there is no way in hell I'm going to let a game take up half my damn hard drive just so it can run slightly better.

First one being the Captcha from the Escapist. Damn that bot-stopping clanker is sentient sometimes I swear

I agree. I swear that it sometimes really doesn't want me making a post.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Honestly, the only game that was just completely absurd was "The Evil Within". I just rented it for Xbox 360, and for reasons I can't understand, even WITH the disc, it had to install something like 4-5 GB to be played. Seriously, what in the hell for?! I have the disc, I can understand wanting to install some files to make the game run more smoothly, but 5 GB?!