Biggest bullshit in a video game

It's been said before and it's not exactly part of the actual gameplay but file sizes. Was downloading the Tomb Raider games after epic gave them away recently and thought shit these are massive, the latest one is 60 GB or something.

Thought let's install some other stuff while I'm at it. NBA 2K21 - 120 GB download. What the actual fuck? For a basketball game? Are they including high res textures for every single player's sweaty balls in the game install or something.
You think that's bad. If you have the latest CoD, be prepared to have 250GB of bloated stuff on your hard drive for Warzone. Even if you don't intend to play it.
 
Raycevick did an interesting video on this. The problem is games will include multiple high-quality language tracks, uncompressed audio, gigantic modes, and higher quality textures. Essentially, games are stuffed with shit few people really care about (Raycevick himself points out that very few people will be able to run those fancy higher quality textures on certain games, and yet they're still forced into a 175 GB download) but they're forced onto everyone, final file size be damned.


It's a good watch and certainly explains why games are getting too big.
 
Raycevick did an interesting video on this. The problem is games will include multiple high-quality language tracks, uncompressed audio, gigantic modes, and higher quality textures. Essentially, games are stuffed with shit few people really care about (Raycevick himself points out that very few people will be able to run those fancy higher quality textures on certain games, and yet they're still forced into a 175 GB download) but they're forced onto everyone, final file size be damned.


It's a good watch and certainly explains why games are getting too big.
"Where games are developed fuels the complacency, games that are mostly developed in big cities by young people in tech hubs where everyone has fiber optic and download speed is never a concern"
"Plus there is still some idiots who mock a game being a small download size..."

That sounds so fucking stupid that i fully believe it.
 
That sounds so fucking stupid that i fully believe it.
>Last year see Hitman 2 on sale for less than 15 bucks, have played the first, cool, I'll buy.
>Takes like 2 days to download.
>Takes up half my console harddrive
>Half the shit is locked forever because you needed to be online and kill the target when it was live x years ago.
Fuck modern gaming. This is why I stick to Souldborne shit and open worlds.
 
Raycevick did an interesting video on this. The problem is games will include multiple high-quality language tracks, uncompressed audio, gigantic modes, and higher quality textures. Essentially, games are stuffed with shit few people really care about (Raycevick himself points out that very few people will be able to run those fancy higher quality textures on certain games, and yet they're still forced into a 175 GB download) but they're forced onto everyone, final file size be damned.


It's a good watch and certainly explains why games are getting too big.
thank god for repacks
 
How to deal with Anor Londo archers 101:
Step 1. Run up the slope, slow down as needed to regen stamina
Step 2. Run up to the archer blocking your path
Step 3a. If he pulls out his sword, parry his attack and roll into him. Either you will roll through or you will push him off
Step 3b. If he continues firing arrows, roll through, kick him angled away from the way, and roll into him. Either you will roll through or you will push him off
Step 4. Bonfire
Lightning Spear with a faith build in DS1 is super OP (it got nerfed in the sequels). It makes black/silver knights much easier to deal with.

Bullshit tax: on the subject of Dark Souls, enemies that seem to have infinite stamina and can stunlock you into oblivion. Or the ones that can somehow hit you through a wall or stationary obstacle.

I also hate how you can blow a character's questline because you missed some autistically specific requirement, such as "you didn't talk to them the time they were hiding in a barrel down an alley."
 
Lightning Spear with a faith build in DS1 is super OP (it got nerfed in the sequels). It makes black/silver knights much easier to deal with.

Bullshit tax: on the subject of Dark Souls, enemies that seem to have infinite stamina and can stunlock you into oblivion. Or the ones that can somehow hit you through a wall or stationary obstacle.

I also hate how you can blow a character's questline because you missed some autistically specific requirement, such as "you didn't talk to them the time they were hiding in a barrel down an alley."
Yep, Arianna's storyline in Bloodborne is bullshit. It's not that big a deal because you only require three umbilical cords to get the Moon Presence at the end, but my last playthrough I blew it, thinking I wasn't gonna get the Moon Presence (I was doing an all bosses run).
 
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Raycevick did an interesting video on this. The problem is games will include multiple high-quality language tracks, uncompressed audio, gigantic modes, and higher quality textures. Essentially, games are stuffed with shit few people really care about (Raycevick himself points out that very few people will be able to run those fancy higher quality textures on certain games, and yet they're still forced into a 175 GB download) but they're forced onto everyone, final file size be damned.


It's a good watch and certainly explains why games are getting too big.
Something nice about PS5 games is the file sizes are smaller least compared to the same games on the ps4/xbox.
 
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I was playing Age of Empires II and holy fuck Bayinnaung's final mission is some shit.

So it starts as a baseless mission where you have two big armies on both sides of the map. You've got a shitton of units, but the only ranged units you get are Arambai, which do a lot of damage but can't hit fucking anything. Other than them, you get a ton of elephants, a handful of decent cavalry, and a bunch of mediocre swordsmen and siege units. The problem is, your enemies use a ton of ranged units and pikemen, none of which you get a great counter for. Pikemen will rip your elephants apart, and the AI is smart enough to kite your elephants with archers. It's micromanagement hell and I hate everything about it.
 
Some other stuff bloating game size:
  • Dev costs are sky-high. Which is cheaper for them, compressing the assets and then troubleshooting any artifacts that pop up, or just saying "fuck it" and shipping?
  • DLC all needs to be local. So in COD, you need those cat ears and gun skins you didn't buy so the players who did can show them off
  • Modern tools make it easier to make every single thing uniquely textured, so not only are the textures bigger, but they're not reused as much
  • Regarding the language packs and whatever, it reduces costs on their end to not have to manage multiple distributions. Which would I rather do, make you waste an extra 5 GB on language packs you don't need, or accidentally ship the Swedish version to Norway?
  • Gamers don't buy games based on install size, but they will ook and skree online days for days if they read that a reviewer with a Geforce RTX 9X9700 XT Autist Edition was disappointed with the texture resolution when he used his sniper rifle to zoom in on a blade of grass.

Honestly the cheap difficulty tricks the Souls games get away with is astounding.
Because that's all they are. So if you hate that shit, it weeds you out of the pool of potential players within about 4 minutes, and if you don't, you will love every minute of them.
 
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The "lol it's too hard to compress stuff" argument is such retarded horseshit. Ogg vorbis and FLAC are both free (open source and unencumbered) and are arguably easier to deal with than whatever native garbage the console SDKs foist onto developers. Not to mention it's faster at runtime since "load half as much and decompress on the fly" is a lot less I/O over a busy bus than "load it all uncompressed yolo."

The worst is when they ship dialogue in stereo when the game downmixes to mono and remixes it to position it relative to the player anyway. Literally double the size for nothing (compression or not).

Incompetent lazy dipshits.
 
Dauntless is a free to play chinese ripoff of Monster Hunter and at one point they made a patch to reduce the filesize by a couple gigabytes. The game literally exist to sell cosmetics, they had no incentive to do that whatsoever, but they did it anyway. I realize big companies aren't my friends, but if they refuse to compress their big ass game, they're dicks.
 
Dauntless is a free to play chinese ripoff of Monster Hunter and at one point they made a patch to reduce the filesize by a couple gigabytes. The game literally exist to sell cosmetics, they had no incentive to do that whatsoever, but they did it anyway. I realize big companies aren't my friends, but if they refuse to compress their big ass game, they're dicks.

China also don't want blacks and want Big booba in their vidya and I'm supposed to believe their the bad guy?
 
>Last year see Hitman 2 on sale for less than 15 bucks, have played the first, cool, I'll buy.
>Takes like 2 days to download.
>Takes up half my console harddrive
>Half the shit is locked forever because you needed to be online and kill the target when it was live x years ago.
Fuck modern gaming. This is why I stick to Souldborne shit and open worlds.
I have Hitman 2 with all the DLC installed right now:
1643241600020.png


at least Hitman 2's one of those games where you can uninstall levels piecemeal, and it does tie in all of Hitman 2016, so it's a bit of a stretch, but, still. 150gb, lmao.

2nd-5th place for my biggest games I currently have installed are:
  • Payday 2, 76.13gb
  • FarCry 5, 75.24gb
  • XCOM 2, 74.96gb
  • The Crew 2, 54.39gb
Everything else is under 50gb.

By the way, fun facts about how small and efficient games used to be:
1643242148371.png


Super Mario Bros. is such a small game that it's actually about 10% smaller in filesize than @Secret Asshole's Secret Techniques to Storytelling (text only, excluding images, and only the first two posts in the thread):
1643242767782.png
 
I have Hitman 2 with all the DLC installed right now:
View attachment 2923459

at least Hitman 2's one of those games where you can uninstall levels piecemeal, and it does tie in all of Hitman 2016, so it's a bit of a stretch, but, still. 150gb, lmao.

2nd-5th place for my biggest games I currently have installed are:
  • Payday 2, 76.13gb
  • FarCry 5, 75.24gb
  • XCOM 2, 74.96gb
  • The Crew 2, 54.39gb
Everything else is under 50gb.

By the way, fun facts about how small and efficient games used to be:
View attachment 2923485

Super Mario Bros. is such a small game that it's actually about 10% smaller in filesize than @Secret Asshole's Secret Techniques to Storytelling (text only, excluding images, and only the first two posts in the thread):
View attachment 2923500
Back in the day, there was a hard limit on file size, and game makers had to get creative to get around that shit. Nowadays, optimizing and reducing redundancy isn't required basically at all.

It also doesn't help that PS3/PS4 (and possibly Xbox, I do not know) had a built it cheat to make the games load faster; store assets in multiple places on the HDD and grab whichever version of it is closest. It's a big reason why properly optimized versions of PS4 games with a PS5 version have the PS5 version weighing in significantly lower despite the much higher quality assets.
 
The "lol it's too hard to compress stuff" argument is such retarded horseshit. Ogg vorbis and FLAC are both free (open source and unencumbered) and are arguably easier to deal with than whatever native garbage the console SDKs foist onto developers. Not to mention it's faster at runtime since "load half as much and decompress on the fly" is a lot less I/O over a busy bus than "load it all uncompressed yolo."

The problem is not that a studio with a $100m budget for a game can't afford licensing costs for compression, or that it's hard to click "save as" and choose a compressed format. In the HD era, you've got to make sure that the result didn't result in any weird color artifacts, tinniness on the high end, explosions sounding like shit under certain conditions with full 7.1, etc. All it does is add extra QA costs while adding zero extra sales.

It's easiest to just not compress things because then the odds of an edge case sounding like shit and losing you 0.1 points on Metacritic drop from "low" to "zero."
 
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