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
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?
I was looking at wipeout 3's files the other day and there's MAYBE 100 megs of actual game data in there, everything else is raw audio tracks and intro videos to fill out 600 megs or so. I think most of the big multi disk JRPGs are similar: miniscule game data and most of it is just video.
So what about modern games? I think most cutscenes are pre rendered now, does the actual 3d asset data take up THAT much space? Is it textures? Is it high quality audio files? What in the world are they doing that games take up so much space?
I would not be surprised if it's marketing at this point. Easiest way to get people to talk about your game is to make it fucking huge.