Dying Light, Techland's upcoming parkour-themed undead romp with Oculus Rift support, recently stunned us with higher prospective RAM demands than anything we'd ever seen. Those requirements have since been lowered significantly, but in all the bluster, the space it asked of your poor hard drive was barely noticed, but it was 40 GB and it's a lot. The second most demanding game requirements we've ever seen were for Assassin's Creed: Unity which wanted a comparatively friendly 6GB minimum of RAM, but 50 GB of install space. This still is a full tenth of the size of many gamers' hard drives.
Remember how great discs were back in the day? So much easier to store than cartridges. And it wasn’t long after that that we didn’t even need anything as cumbersome as a CD to store our games and media, provided we had a nice big 30 GB hard drive that could fit about 43 times as much. With more and more games asking incredibly high install sizes, those discs are starting to look a lot more attractive again - there are DVDs and Blu-Ray discs now that hold vastly more than CDs but do so in exactly the same amount of physical space, while buying bigger and bigger hard drives to accommodate downloads that often already cost more than the discs is still a very expensive habit.
Of course, we have to weigh up the spectacular improvements we’ve seen in the quality of games. These drastic download sizes are only so big to feed our need for bigger and better looking content.
Where does it end? Has something got to give way? Hard drive capacities will surely keep getting bigger and as it spreads the technology will become cheaper and yes - internet speed will probably take care of how long it takes to download the terabyte-sized games when they arrive, but what kind of power are we going to need to achieve all of this? Is there an upper limit to how much quality and quantity can be packed into a game before we get bored anyway? And besides, do games even need so much detail to be worthy of our time? Everything has its place, but there are so many terrific little indie games that suggest they don't. And for reference, the Xbox One's hard drive, at a user-accessible capacity of 362 GB, will store approximately 20 modern games at most.
And is all this crazy? That wily old clever-clogs Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sound familiar?
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maybe they can pull off a no mans sky. not actually store the game on the cd but use algorithms to geneate the world as it goes on.
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hmm, that's impossible.
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clearly, it is as no mans sky is using just that to generate their non randomly generated universe of a game world
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non? well, but size will be bigger than no mans sky...because it more texture than no mans sky and have storyline
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I still have 1.6 GB Quantum Hard Drive on my PII machine. Runs Windows 98 SE like a champ, with PII Pro 450 mhz with the 512KB Cache! and 120MB SD RAM. Awesome machine, brings me back in my childhod when they was the most powerfull machines on the market. Cheers!
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Yeah I know... We still have a machine in our office with a 1.8 GHz Athlon XP and some 64 MB GPU and 768 MB RAM from 2002... It was considered upper middle class rig for its time...
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A major problem I find is there are less and less reoccurring assets in games now. When done right they look great and make the game smaller. Also, the number of polygons is getting rediculous. There is a threshold to when a human can see the individual polygons and the threshold was reached a few years ago.
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They care more about pretty looks now than actual content in game... Look at Dishonored... Graphics are nothing to write home about (maxed out at 50 fps average on 1920x1080 on GT 640 and HD 6670) but it was easily the best game on PC in 2012 as far as story and campaign go...
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Yeah, new games rely almost completely on their graphics engine to deliver good visuals and it inflates the game. Of course, the new graphic engines are looking more and more the same between ultra low and high. Seems pointless to me.
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I really don't understand where all of this extra data is coming from. Even comparing recent PC games to their PS4/XB1 counterparts. Battlefield 4 on my PS4 with all of the DLC map packs takes up a massive 56 GB of space. I don't think Battlefield 4 on my PC with all the DLC takes up even 1/2 of that.
How can a game like BIoshock Infinite require only around 12 GB but Killzone SF requires 40
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18gb left... it isn't worth it. Im paying 50 bucks for a game to kill my HDD and on top of that, steam locks my download to 381kb/s even though my internet is 2mb/s... downloading will take weeks.
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game publishers need to rethink their way of game distribution,
major amount of disk space take uncompressed textures, audio and video files,
I think it would be fair to allow gamers to choose which quality they want to download and also some sort of download checkpoints where one could play incompletely-downloaded game, for ex. me with decent speakers system I'd definitely prefer highest audio quality while I wouldn't mind having lower quality videos maybe and also not the highest textures since my GTX770 is only 2GB anyway; and since I tend to just quickly play-through storyline I wouldn't need multiplayer data at all :P
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I still remember being shocked that the old N64 emulation ROMS were frequently less than 1MB per game. All of those memories of my childhood took up no more than 1MB?!
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the only thing a gamer like me can do is to return to physical copies i dont have to suffer from waiting for too long and i can uninstall and install the game whenever i like so yep physical copies are the answer
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This is why I find myself playing older games much more often these days. The entertainment I can get from a meager 700mb or so vs the 30-50g...
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same here.
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same
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Estimated download time: infinity+1
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I though it was just over 9000 hours...?
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Not on my internet :-)
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It should scan your hardware and let you choose the recommended framerate you want so it can download the right quality of the textures for 30fps, 60fps, etc.
*also: If the game is optimized well then i wouldnt mind a 30-50GB AAA game
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I really don't see much of a problem here. 2 Terrabyte HDD's are quite cheap and you can always put more than or 2 HDD's into your PC. Only people who cry are those who stupidly use SDD's
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Read my comments and TheThing2010's comments below... People shouldn't be forced to download and install crap they never plan on using... Those who want such options are the only ones who should have to suffer downloading and installing them...
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I have a "normal" 7200 rpm HD and a SSD. Although the HD has much more space my SSD runs circles around it. Using a SSD is not stupid. Recent games seem to run better when loading textures from my SSD. (far cry 4) BF4 multiplayer I can get in earlier to grab a certain vehicle I want etc.
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I agree if someone doesn't need the ridiculously data heavy high textures why should they have to download it and use up space? Remember a lot of people have data caps on the internet (some fiber networks have no data cap). Why should they download 4k textures when the screen they are on only displays 1080p - 1440p?
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From one point of view, AAA games have grown over the years, and technology's speed and space have increased dramatically. But on the other hand, people shouldn't have to forcefully install things they don't need or want for most games. Sooner or later, technology will be so far advanced to understand it anymore.
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that moment you download a huge file only to discover that it doesnt work...
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they should just give us the options to download what textures files we want to run the game at instead of downloading all the textures and other setting oriented file this would save massive storage.
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Seconded... If someone does not want to download 4k texture pack that leaves their poor HDD struggling for breath, then they should have that option... Those who want those 4k textures should be the only ones whose HDDs and internet speeds need suffer...
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exactly a 4k texture takes up so much space its not even funny and most people don't use it and the pore hard drive suffer's :/
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It is actually pushing a hugely unnecessary product unto customers who have no desire to use it... It may seem harmless but considering it makes customers who don't want to use it needlessly suffer, it is downright malevolent...
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Can't agree more. And they should cost more as well. I mean why should I pay for 4k textures when my PC doesn't even support it?
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Ditto for audio files, would be nice if we could choose compression level. I dont have a super hi-def audio setup and dont need uncompressed files
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actually if the audio is compressed, the system requirements would be even higher, so you should appreciate that. This is the very reason why the installation size for the PC version of Titanfall is so big vs the Xbox One version.
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It's not only about textures. For example languages. Why do i have to download 5 different subtitles an voice acting? I need only one. And some games even store every cutscene in every language separately.
.
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And audio is usually uncompressed nowadays, which can bloat the game quite a bit. It was actually one of the challenges Bethesda had to face when they made Oblivion because there were just so many recorded lines. 8 years later, here we are.
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Another idea here. How about the cut scenes are streamed directly from the Internet so we don't have to download them? this will also discourage piracy because pirated games do not connect to the Internet.
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That would actually be a bad idea... Halo Anniversary received a lot of flak because the terminal videos were streamed from Halo Waypoint rather than in-game... You unlock this cool easter egg that gives you more info on the expanded universe and it makes you leave the game and takes you to website...? That was annoying as hell... Destiny also suffered from a similar issue I believe... Also, imagine someone's internet is down and they're happily playing the game but no cutscene...? How would they proceed...?
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Yeah didn't thought that :) but I am talking about in-game streaming not leaving the game to watch the video.
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You mean animated cutscenes instead of real time rendered...?
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Yeah something like that....maybe.
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not everyone have good internet speed or have the internet
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not like we could do anything about it, yep, the horror of being customer..
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Big games can fit into just a few GB.For example,Skyrim is only 6 GB with DLCs.Most of this space is wasted(and i think that's the best term) on graphics,that don't really look that much better than smaller games.
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"And is all this crazy? That wily old clever-clogs Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sound familiar?"
Yeah - Far Cry 3, Definition of Insanity, said by the legendary Vaas.
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you are RiGHT, totally RiGHT, couldn't agree less 0.0... i need 3 days at least to download that sigh (and i couldn´t run it anyways)
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Next-gen games require more time to develop, but that's something developers don't want to understand. They only want to make the game, optimize it to run at a playable level on consoles, add insane system requirements for PC and release the game.