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Starfield install size revealed, available to preload now
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Not really the place for it, but why do some people still get so annoyed about the size of games these days?
If you want games to continue improving then the file sizes are going to increase. Maybe devs could do more, but at the same time it’s just a fact that high res textures and larger scale games need more space.
Fallout 3 released two hardware generations ago at around 8GB. Fallout 4 released last gen and sits at around 25GB. One generation later, Starfield is launching at ~140GB - almost 6x the file size of the previous generation.
I can't speak for everybody, but my PC storage didn't jump to 6x capacity in that amount of time, and my download speeds didn't get 6x faster. But I imagine that's why it's concerning to some people.
Even just going by console standards, we're looking at only a jump of 2x capacity between the Xbox One and Xbox Series X - or exactly the same if you have a Series S. It takes up over 20% of the storage Series S in just one game - with a mandatory install, unspecified patch sizes, impending DLC, etc.
Obviously there's a discussion to be had of WHY the games are increasing exponentially like that, but on the surface that's likely where the bulk of the frustration comes from.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.
That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.
That's why I mentioned languages, too. I'm not saying that it's bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they're not going to be used.
It's possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don't care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users's time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative "trim the fat" branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn't high to do.
Here's the thing: I don't want games to keep improving, at least, not in that way. It doesn't mean anything to me that the game includes ultraHD textures and looks stunning on an 8K monitor because I'm still rocking a 3070 with a 1080 120 Hz. The fact that it takes them three years to make a game look this good, which is meaningless to a majority of gamers who can't afford that kind of hardware, is especially frustrating. And now they're telling us for the pleasure of waiting so long for them to put the finishing touches on what is effectively marketing material, I have to reserve not just 100+ GB, but all that space on an SSD because the game loads too damn slow otherwise? That's like an eighth of the available space on your average m.2 drive, for one game, for something most people won't even be able to enjoy because their hardware just isn't made for that kind of output.
I don't want sixteen times the detail, I want an optimized game with serviceable assets and a gameplay loop that doesn't feel like a second job. And granted, this is getting beyond the graphics argument, but I like games that aren't afraid of not appealing to the broadest audience. I want my Fallout in Space to have more than four dialog options that all point the same direction. I want to make meaningful choices and play a character that has real opinions and can act accordingly, instead of endless modifiers on the gear of a voice-acted talking doll that exists to service a mostly linear plot. I don't want F4, I want FNV. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the reviews come out and it ends up being as meaningful as I want it to be, but I'm not holding my breath, and in all likelihood I'm not jumping through the hardware hoops to play a game I probably won't like.
Not everyone has large SSDs with space to spare to play multiple games, it seems like it would be pretty straight forward to have HD texture pack downloadable as DLC or something like Skyrim had back in the day, I wonder why more devs don't do that? That would give players a choice of which to use.
Requires even more work and even more budget. I understand the problem but it has always been there. There are people now who can't afford 1tb and there were people 20 years ago who couldn't afford 50gb when that was the equivalent. This won't ever go away. And it's fault by consumers who expect bigger and better things for less and less money. You can only optimize so much on your budget. I still understand this is a problem it's just not one that will get solved anytime soon, which is a shame.
It genuinely doesn't take meaningful work.
They already do all the relevant categorization for what can get loaded when with graphics settings and presets. It's basically flipping a switch.
You're right that it would take budget and time of course, but it doesn't seem like a huge amount of work for most dev studios compared to making their game more accessible to a wider audience? I feel like there's some marketing thing of "our game is so awesome it takes 1000GB of disk space!" going on, which is really stupid, but it's probably working sadly!
You're not quite right about 20 years ago, though - I was a gamer 20 years ago (yes, your comment did make me feel old) and disk space wasn't really something people complained about, at least with respect to games. Even Sims 2 with all it's 18 expansions only took up around 10GB or so, whereas most games were 5GB or less, they had to be otherwise you couldn't fit them on a DVD. Most gamers had at least 100GB+ hard drives, 200GB+ was more common. Starfield requires 130GB of disk space, and according to the Steam Hardware Survey, at least 18% of gamers don't have that much to spare, and significantly fewer aren't going to have that to spare on an SSD and will suffer the indignity of slow load times :)
I remember buying my first hard drive for 2000 sek which is arround 180 dollars. So that's actually more expensive than 1tb today. That was more than 20 years ago but I only got 20gb worth of space. A few years later and we should arrive at the 20 years-ago-mark which made me write 50. I def wouldn't say most people had 200gb hard drives 20 years ago. If they did no one could complain 20 years later if BG3 would still fit on that drive.
It really doesn't. They include both anyway, there's no reason they can't do it as a separate download. Rainbow 6 Siege did it back in 2015 with their ultra high definition textures pack which is a 30gb download for a game that's 60gb without it. Lots of players have no use for the ridiculously high-definition textures, it would definitely make sense to separate them from the main package and cut possibly several hours or even days of download time for some people.
If it's that easy I agree!
I think most people have 1tb of storage space and not much else. Most games these days are well under 100gb. In that respect, it’s kind of ridiculous to have one game take up 1/10th of your storage. I doubt most gamers are going to see those high res textures anyway.
Your point is valid though, too. Games are only increasing in size. I already have 5tb total in my PC but would need more space to install this particular game (I have a lot of games lol). I don’t have a problem upgrading but I don’t think a lot of people the money to buy a $70 plus a good HDD/SSD. Just my thoughts on this.
Yeah, people bitching like "nobody needs those big ass textures and high quality uncompressed audio." Maybe you don't need it, but high quality, textures are one of the easiest ways to improve graphic quality without putting that much load on the GPU. And I still rip my CDs as FLACs, so I want good audio quality in my games as well.
You really want lossless audio in games? Do you know how big FLACs are in comparison to OGGs? Could most people really hear the difference? Keep in mind the quality of the average headset or desktop speakers. I don't think any games store lossless audio. If they did, I'd bet they would be much, much bigger.
Actually... no, you're completely right. That's why I just wrote "good audio quality", whatever that means. I actually read in some of those "why are games so big today" posts that people suggested that game devs don't compress their audio files enough. Some people don't get that this would come at a cost.
The average gamer might play with pretty shitty headsets but I think developers should go a little bit further than that and also satisfy enthusiasts. Up to a certain degree of course. That's why I think it's completely reasonable to demand ultra wide support or the physics not breaking above 60 fps.
(I actually expected a much worse reply) Nah I willingly interpreted what you said in the most extreme way possible. But in my mind there's something of a ceiling when it comes to noticable improvements in audio quality, especially when compared to visuals, and it's much lower than lossless. Besides, encoding is far from the only determining factor of audio quality. I think now, as discussed in other threads, the primary factor of ballooning file size is sheer quantity. We want more dialogue, more varied and adaptive music, more immersive soundscapes - and there's no trick to achieving this other than more content, meaning more disk space. Maybe one day we'll find an audio compression algorithm that will perform miracles, but until then audio still forms a significant portion of any game's install, compressed or not.
It's not that nobody wants those super high def graphics, it's that most people have no use for them. Most people won't be able to play a game like Starfield at maxed out graphics, so why should they have to download and store an extra 30gb of textures?
while i fully agree it should be an extra download that not everyone should be required to download. i see lots of sentiment here that people feel they shouldn't even make them cause most cant use it. but why should those that can make use of the textures not have them, also helps the game stay more relevant graphically for longer as more people have systems that can make use of the textures
It would be ridiculous to hamstring new games just because some people can't run them at max graphics. It definitely makes more sense to make the high-requirement features optional, not to cut them out entirely. People who buy high-end hardware shouldn't be held back by those who can't afford it, but those who can't afford it shouldn't be held back for the benefit of those who can either.
Isn't this usually just LOD stuff where the high-quality stuff is when you're up close and the low quality stuff is for when you're far away? So you're just about always seeing the high-quality stuff, and it's the stuff that's actually processed in real time like shadows and stuff, that take up practically no space, that are getting toggled when you turn down settings. That's how I understand it anyway.
What LOD does is it uses multiples of the same textures in different sizes so that it doesn't display the larger ones if it doesn't need to. That takes up space due to duplicates, but 4K resolution textures take up 4 times the space that 2K resolution textures do. I'm sure compression reduces some of that, but in terms of size, they are 4 times larger. So if your system can't handle 4K textures, then why use them at all? There's a lot of stuff that you'll never look at close enough that a 4K texture will ever serve a purpose. For a 1080p screen, you'd have to be close enough to the object that you're only seeing a fraction of the texture at once, and they can use other tricks to make close-up textures look better without using bigger ones.
If you have a top-of-the-line PC, it makes sense to install those huge textures, but if you're running an old GPU with 2GB of memory, what use do you have for them? You may as well not install them at all.
All consumers want it fast, want it cheap, want it good, want it on their machine, want it maintained in perpetuity, want it small, and want it to load quickly. Nevermind that a number of those are diametrically opposed ideals.
I had thought that at least Microsoft's plan was to for allow their cloud infrastructure to handle background loading processes so that there didn't need to be such giant file sizes and so developers could have more computing power to work with.
Whatever happened to that?
Even if that tech worked, you wouldn't want the games you buy to rely on it.