Massive File Size Hate Thread

[Agent Abe Caprine]

One I've not seen mentioned, and I expect this to be an unpopular opinion. YouTube and comments sections. In the same way AAA devs were found to be using DSP as the measure of an "average" player and thus dumbed games down, glitch YouTubers like Crowbcat and pixel counters like Digital Foundry are part of the problem. It's easy to zoom in using a sniper rifle, and say how the game sucks because "the texture on this crisp packet in a gutter you zoom past in at 100mph while buildings explode around you isn't true 4k! Lazy devs! -8000/10".

The people who grew up watching those videos are the devs now. Kids are bad at understanding that stuff like laughing at a glitch or a weird texture isn't usually meant to be taken seriously. Those kids are now adults.

 

[Staffy]

Going from Borderlands 2's 20gb which is already a bit hefty, to 130+ gb in Borderlands 3 is pure fucktardedness. It's also the least optimized shit when it comes to loading things and it chokes on its own with that garbage that you need to login to if you want to play with everyone else online.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

Honkai Star Rail on my phone takes 14.28 GB. On the newest patch, they introduced data deletion for past events. Without it, it would've taken 20+ GB.

This is another MHY game but on PC.

 

[Jesse Nicholas Radin]

I remember being amazed at my 4 gig hard drive. Then games were a gigabyte each.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I remember being amazed at my 4 gig hard drive. Then games were a gigabyte each.

Same. I remember having a 128gb hdd in my first PC, and this was considered ludicrous. Why would you need that much space? One of my college tutors even said that hard drives had peaked because there was no way anyone could fill that much space without deliberately wasting it.

I don't even own a ninth generation console but I still happen to know many people who do, and they cannot download more than 25% of their purchased library. I don't even remember owning a game with more than 50 GB. Most of them games happen to be boring, unimaginative or straight out way too easy to the point of absurdity.

I once heard a conspiracy theory that was intended. The idea being to keep you locked in to a handful of GAAS games.

 

[WULULULULU]

75GB for PAYDAY 2, and that game isn't even live service. Starbreeze just squeezed the entire insanity of the Diesel Engine and didn't even bother optimizing it for the masses.

 

[Megaton Punch]

I still remember the days when 5-7 GB was "really large" for a game.

HUMONGOUS INSTALLATION

(625 MB)

 

[Tomboy Tuti]

Thanks for this thread, it's been a seething passionate hatred of mine under the surface from at least 2019. Whenever I bought this up online at the time I was called an idiot for whining about progress.
Well I'll take 10 ps2 games amounting to 30 gb over a modern day 30 gb game anyday.

One I've not seen mentioned, and I expect this to be an unpopular opinion. YouTube and comments sections. In the same way AAA devs were found to be using DSP as the measure of an "average" player and thus dumbed games down, glitch YouTubers like Crowbcat and pixel counters like Digital Foundry are part of the problem. It's easy to zoom in using a sniper rifle, and say how the game sucks because "the texture on this crisp packet in a gutter you zoom past in at 100mph while buildings explode around you isn't true 4k! Lazy devs! -8000/10".

I don't think it's a problem, crowbcat like myself advocates for doing more with less in gameplay terms. When crowbcat says detail he alludes to gameplay detail, functionality, not actual graphics. From a software perspective it makes sense, you increase the functionality as much as possible even if you don't make it look better. Games are toys, it doesn't matter if they look great or not, they should be more functional in a meaningful way. The industry sacrificed functionality for graphics in a sort of faustian bargain, either through incompetence or malice.

 

[Caddo Cobgang]

I don't even own a ninth generation console but I still happen to know many people who do, and they cannot download more than 25% of their purchased library. I don't even remember owning a game with more than 50 GB. Most of them games happen to be boring, unimaginative or straight out way too easy to the point of absurdity.

I have a Series X, its not too bad if you have a memory card that you jam into the back of the console but yeah its still fucking annoying, and the 2TB ones are half the price of the console itself, even a lot of pre-built PCs dont come with a lot of internal hard drive space, something is going to have to be done, i expect to see more purges in the industry in the next few years as it goes on a path back to normalcy, eventually were going to go back to 6th gen scale of video games, even if some execs go down kicking and screaming, like the execs at Rockstar for example

 

[Judge Dredd]

I don't think it's a problem, crowbcat like myself advocates for doing more with less in gameplay terms. When crowbcat says detail he alludes to gameplay detail, functionality, not actual graphics. From a software perspective it makes sense, you increase the functionality as much as possible even if you don't make it look better. Games are toys, it doesn't matter if they look great or not, they should be more functional in a meaningful way. The industry sacrificed functionality for graphics in a sort of faustian bargain, either through incompetence or malice.

Maybe, but even if we give Crowbcat the benefit of doubt, that's not how idiots take it. And AAA listen to those idiots, for some reason.

For example. Dead Rising 4. A mess of a game. Pretty much universally hated. Fucks up everything that made Dead Rising popular. Crowbcat makes a video comparing DR1 to DR4, including how bodies flinch when shot in DR1 but not DR4. So what do the devs do? Add bodies that flinch when shot. Leave the game as a complete mess otherwise. But hey, idiots can't scream "the bodies don't flinch when shot!"

Bethesda did the same. The writing wasn't great in Fallout 3, but instead of taking the criticism to heart, they focused on the often repeated line "but how do they eat?". So Fallout 4, 76, and Starfield had the same shity writing if not worse, but with farms everywhere. Big improvement.

 

[M3xus]

I remember back in 1997 or 1998 there was an FPS called SiN. It wasn't terrible or great, but it was pretty good. One of the knocks against it, at the time, was it took a full gig of space. 15 GB of storage space seemed ludicrous then, and I seem to remember PC Gamer asking "why does this take a whole gig?" Seems quaint now.

 

[Tomboy Tuti]

Maybe, but even if we give Crowbcat the benefit of doubt, that's not how idiots take it. And AAA listen to those idiots, for some reason.

For example. Dead Rising 4. A mess of a game. Pretty much universally hated. Fucks up everything that made Dead Rising popular. Crowbcat makes a video comparing DR1 to DR4, including how bodies flinch when shot in DR1 but not DR4. So what do the devs do? Add bodies that flinch when shot. Leave the game as a complete mess otherwise. But hey, idiots can't scream "the bodies don't flinch when shot!"

Bethesda did the same. The writing wasn't great in Fallout 3, but instead of taking the criticism to heart, they focused on the often repeated line "but how do they eat?". So Fallout 4, 76, and Starfield had the same shity writing if not worse, but with farms everywhere. Big improvement.

I still think it's a problem with the so called idiots instead of crowbcat. This details thing is not a new problem and he's not the only person making such points, there are hundreds of videos on YouTube and twitter about 2k era games having more game details than contemporary ones, it's an entire genre of media online. Ignoring all the tech discussion, the reason why games suck today is people put too little effort into preproduction and concepting. 80% of the game takes shape then and if you can't design a fun game on paper (literal paper not metaphorically) then the game is probably not worth making. It's part of the reason why we don't see any new mechanics, great mechanics can be designed on paper and tweaked during production. Most old games can be broken down on paper into design documents, probably would be a good exercise for gamedev. Game detail should be part of preproduction where you chart the in game interactions before you script them. But people don't put much thought into the mechanics themselves, much less the details. Tech constraints can be overcome to a large extent if your assets are small and reused. One of the reasons why size is big now is cause of the overinvestment in polygons, resolution and lighting/particle systems (last one taking the most space imo), which are unnecessary.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I remember back in 1997 or 1998 there was an FPS called SiN. It wasn't terrible or great, but it was pretty good. One of the knocks against it, at the time, was it took a full gig of space. 15 GB of storage space seemed ludicrous then, and I seem to remember PC Gamer asking "why does this take a whole gig?" Seems quaint now.

That game allowed you different types of installation, from minimal(only install the executable, read the rest from disc), to "medium" or whatever it was called where it copied over all assets but not the FMVs to "full" where it also copied over the FMVs to the HDD. That option was ~600MB all in all and these type of install options were quite common.

But the release build of SiN had a bug. It didn't matter which installation option you chose it would STILL stream the levels/assets from disc instead of the hard drive and this made it so that loading a level or save took for-fucking-ever!
Unless you were running a no-cd crack or pirated the game...

 

[Judge Dredd]

I still think it's a problem with the so called idiots instead of crowbcat.

Yes, but they are still the ones giving them ammo. To go back to the Dead Rising example. It's easier to show a 6 second gif of bodies flinching when shot, than it is to explain how Frank is out of character or that the gameplay is shallow. It's also an easier fix that will silence to idiot normies.

Ignoring all the tech discussion, the reason why games suck today is people put too little effort into preproduction and concepting.

Disagree.

There are lots of examples like Arkham Asylum, Sim City, and Halo, where the game changed drastically from initial concept to final game because they followed the fun. Bad ideas were discarded, fun things were leaned into. Bioshock was originally set on an island, but one of the best things about it was the underwater setting.

It's like the old writing debate of planners vs pantsers. Some games are meticulously planned, some come together over development.

There is no thought put into mechanics because AAA games believed they have solved game design, and people who go to university to get degrees in game design are taught the one true way to make a game. ie. The Ubisoft formula. This is why they threw a fit about Elden Ring for it's "bad UX" because the suicide squad method of covering the screen with meters is seen as the "correct" way to do things. Oddly enough, this can also be blamed in part on YouTubers like Extra Credits, who know fuck all but convince people they know game design.

which are unnecessary.

EDF. It's not "necessary" that you can make the soldiers sing, but it's fun and is included for shits and giggles.

Game design isn't a mechanical science where you could just have beige cubes throwing numbers at each other, and all the numbers add up to the same. It would be perfectly balanced mechanically but dull as dishwater.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Bigger textures happened. The size of assets grow as the square of linear resolution. Which is simply not sustainable.

It's not just bigger textures but also more textures. Back in the day you only had a texture for the color, now the same object can have tons of textures. Reflections alone are divided into the specular map and roughness map, then you add normal maps, emission maps, ambiant occlusion, now engines support putting the ambiant occlusion, specular and roughness into the same texture. But the more the tech grows, more stuff is added to make the game look realistic and I think that's the core of the issue. Games try too much to be realistic and add needless detail.

 

[Flopper]

I get that BG3 is the size it is because of the amount of scenes it has, it's a huge game with a shit ton of variance, cool.

Then I look at games like Jedi Survivor, Stalker 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds, and I shit my pants. Borderlands 4 is going to be a giga chungus too, no doubt.

 

[Croaking Spider]

Friendly reminder that a team made an FPS in 2004 that clocked in at a whopping 96kb. Granted, it was extremely CPU heavy since it relied on procedural generation. With the jumps in technology, you'd figure modern devs could find a better way to balance workloads and manage file sizes.

The video is worth a watch, it goes pretty in-depth on how the whole thing came together and the clever tricks they used to save space and efficiently manage memory.

 

[Inco G. Nito]

Friendly reminder that the entire sixth and seventh gen (xbox, xbox 360) were bottlenecked by DVDs that supported a max of 6.8 gigabytes. (Barring some very specific examples of multi disc games that were few and far between), every game shipped on those consoles was at most 6.8 gigs. Most of the games didn't even use the whole size. To a degree the engines devs have to use are at fault since that is an unavoidable point of bloat. But in general games just have so much goddamn detail crammed into them to frankly diminishing returns. It seems like every 'realistic' game now looks overproduced, like it's trying too hard to look like real life to the degree that it doesn't look real at all. Real life has a degree of restraint to it. For instance, in a way the late 2000s/early 2010s CoD games look more realistic than many games released now. They have colors that aren't too exaggerated, lighting that isn't too intense. Bodycam and Unrecord are both great examples. Sure, they have fuzzy camera filters on them to help sell the illusion but even with that that, it has restraint that most modern games don't exercise.

 

[Brain Power]

Friendly reminder that the entire sixth and seventh gen (xbox, xbox 360) were bottlenecked by DVDs that supported a max of 6.8 gigabytes. Every game shipped on those consoles was at most 6.8 gigs.

No, not really. Xbox (360 at least) had games that needed multiple dvds (Lost Odyssey uses 4 discs) and playstation 3 used blurays, so games there could use up to 50 GBs in one disc (Metal Gear Solid 4 is one of the most infamous examples)

 

[Jace on ice]

The Rise of The Ronin PC port is somehow a whopping 168 gigs.