UnregisteredHyperCadence
@UnregisteredHyperCadence

no i will not dedicate 100+ gigs of ssd space to Bethesda game

it could be the best game ever made for all i care, if you can't respect my drive space, i'm not installing your game


Lizstar
@Lizstar

It genuinely feels like cost cutting laziness

I've seen people defend it for stuff like Baldur's Gate 3, going "Well it's a 40+ hour game, that's so much content! Plus voice lines and stuff!"

Mother Fucker, games weren't always like this. Persona 3 was 80+ hours and it was like a gig big. I've spent 3000 hours on EU4, and that's 6 gigs. Ogre Battle 64 is 50+ hours and that's like FOUR MEGABYTES. Why are we allowing games in the past year to not respect our drive space?


Lizstar
@Lizstar

Y'all remember when you'd buy a fancy new PC game from Target, and you'd get home and pop the CD in the drive, and the installer would go "SELECT ALL YOU WANT TO INSTALL", and you could select to NOT waste disc space installing like, the Cantonese voice clips for the game, cause why would you need those

Why did that go away lol why are there no options for Steam installers now??


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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

hell, not just our hard drives, but our internet bandwidth as well; not everyone lives in places with decent internet! sucks a lot to finally download your 100GB game and one day be stopped because there's a 10-20GB patch.

I've already cleared out the drive space, and I'll be trying it out on Game pass, cause I ain't paying $70 Buckoids for a Bethesda release.

I do however agree with you on the drive space issues... Some people suggest that these games at least in part are being made so LARGE intentionally to force you to uninstall games and play theirs more.

I think it has less to do with cost cutting laziness and more to do with the fact that the entire industry is basically propped up on two general-purpose IDEs. If I create a new project in Unreal Engine, it's drive print is 8gb before I add a single mesh or character controller. There's so much there that I either won't or can't utilize, and stripping it all out for parsimony is likely to break more than it would improve. Of course Ogre Battle is leaner in all it's 65c816 asm sweetness, but at the end of the day it can only ever be Ogre Battle. If I'm making a tactical deck-building hentai fishing simulator in Unity and I feel compelled to add a fifth overlapping magisterium of cosmic horror, the net impact to my installation footprint is precisely dick.

Something I've noticed in the past few gens is a bunch of games that, if you isolate the gameplay assets, they are relatively small, but then you add in stuff like the prerendered CG cutscenes or the soundtrack and the filesize balloons 100x. One egregious example is FF7Remake which is 100GB and at least 70% of that is a few prerendered CG cutscenes. Not only did they not compress them at all, but also there's 4 different video files for each cutscene because they rendered different lipsynchs for each language with voice acting. I would at the very least like to have an option to only download the ones for the language I want, rather than all of them.

I wonder how much of that disk space is texture made extra detailed for 4k screen and if they could move that to a free downloadable content so you could choose half resolution at a quarter of the size

in reply to @Lizstar's post:

Steam has an option for voices and it can download them selectively, which is always fun when you start a game, find out the German voices are awful and need to restart it and do a download to switch to English

Speaking as a QA engineer now suffering extreme burnout over how terrible QA is: Options are, for lack of a better term, bad.

When a player comes to you with some kind of error, especially on PC, it is already effectively impossible to obtain any kind of useful grasp on the very specific build their machine has. Nobody wants to add to that unless they really, really have to, which is why Skyrim came with an optional DLC for hi res textures back in the way back when, and TESV: SLE no longer has that option, nor indeed the options for installing or not installing DLCs at all.

Games are also more rickety than they were back in the day. For, IDK, Might and Magic VII, pretty much the entire game was developed by the same people. They had their own everything, and a deep understanding of how the entire game worked could be gathered institutionally from within NWC. For TESV: Skyrim, this is no longer the case. If there's a bug, and it's not an obvious bug in how the engine is used, there may be nobody at Bethesda who has the requisite knowledge about Havok to even understand, let alone, fix it.

So what you want to do, as a developer who doesn't want there to be a billion obvious bugs in the product, is to lock things down as much as possible. Everything needs to be strapped down and integrated into a single, shippable product that will be relatively stable between computers.

Some games, especially on Switch, still come with DLCs for customising the experience, generally free DLC with voice packs, stuff like that, but it's pretty locked down overall.

Also, there's marketing: Options aren't features, and what gets a product from planned to finished in time for the Xmas season is features.

Basically, games exist at the interface of capitalism and art, and are, as a result, Bad™.

Steam actually has (or at least had) the facility to automatically download the user's preferred language, and allow them to select per game if they want something different, but no one uses it. For all I know they removed it, like the ability to set up games to play before they're fully downloaded.