Developers are taking a very brute-force approach to detail by just making bigger textures. It's not necessary. There are techniques like detail textures, which was an option in the original Unreal and made a big difference there, or better still, procedural content, which can be absolutely tiny, can avoid tiling if desired and can potentially be evaluated at any resolution if designed right.
@@ARStudios2000 Sure. Detail textures are probably the easiest to understand. You make textures of things like wood grain, grass blades, metal and stone up close, convert to greyscale, and adjust the brightness level so it averages 50%. That averaging is critical. You want it so that if it gets scaled down via mip-mapping that it'll end up at 50% brightness when it hits 1*1 size. When combined with the main coloured texture at a smaller size, it'll add the details to it, taking the colour from the main texture, and as you get further away, the mip-mapping will make them fade out. It's a very cheap way to add more detail to your game world. A handful of small greyscale textures can add details to many much larger ones without the need to use buckets of disk or memory. You can fit 32 256*256 colour textures into 8MB of memory, but you can only fit two 1024*1024 ones. If your detail textures are 128*128, then you can fit 16 of them into the space of one of your 256*256 colour textures, and you're probably going to have a hard time coming up with that many unique detail textures for the entire game as they tend to be readily reusable. Procedural content involves specifying your content as a process the computer can follow to make it. While it's pretty well-known for its use in making randomised levels, it can be used to make anything. The classic 2004 tech-demo .kkreiger implements a single level of an FPS with Doom-3-quality visuals in just 96KB by storing everything as procedural instructions that are used to build everything at load time. The approach taken by .kkreiger does mean it requires a fair bit of RAM (512MB), but it's also entirely possible to do your texture generation at render-time, as many, many shaders on ShaderToy demonstrate. There's even a couple that recreate the visuals from classic games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, including a playable version of the first level of Doom! It's actually easier to design a procedural texture that never tiles than one that does. You basically take spatial coordinates as an input, do some operations on them, and spit out a colour. Noise combined with a sine function and an absolute-value operation can make a passable marble, for instance. Making it tile requires adding some additional operations to make space repeat and prevent seams. It's also trivially easy to make something look like it was carved out of a material with such textures, too. Because they're evaluated based on spatial coordinates (and maybe temporal ones as well), the detail you can get out of procedural textures is limited only by what you include in the functions you use to specify them. Hell, you could probably do procedural detail textures to save on GPU number-crunching if necessary. I'm actually rather rusty on the graphics side of things right now. My experimentation with procedural content has been focussed on sound and making sound effects in PureData lately. If you want a book recommendation on the topic, take a look at "Designing Sound" by Andy Farnell.
@@Roxor128 we made us of procedural generation for our Games fleadh entry this year. Our working title was "this game does not exist". Really love it as an approach to development.
Devs suck at optimizing their games. Most games aren't even worth the 100 gb file size. There's literally no excuse for any game to even go past 100gb.
ngl 10 years ago if a game was 50gb I'd assume it had so much content it would take you years to finish it. Nowadays most 50gb games are like 3 hours long and have a few achievements basically
Similar to your example with Jak and Daxter, I feel a good example of seamless load times is within the Batman Arkham games. At no point in the game do you get placed in a load screen. This leads to unrivaled immersion, how the developers did it was by slowing down game play, for instance, having Batman having to open vents and crawl through them at a slower pace.
The problem is going forward, I think many players will become wise to these tricks and start to complain about them. Especially as other companies start to brag about how they they won't do them with SSDs. Like, let's say The Last of Us 3 comes out on PS5 and Naughty Dog says "hey, since we are on PS5. We don't have to use doors and other such tricks to slow the player down. The world loads instantly. Isn't that amazing!". Now if Batman Arkham Reboot comes out and uses them anyway, many players and RUclipsrs would complain that Rocksteady isn't taking advantage of the new tech and are being outdated. This would push other companies to aim bigger regardless if it's actually more inconvenient in the long run. We already see examples of this happening with other games. Games like Mass Effect Andromeda were blasted for not having cutting edge graphics. And there are countless videos and reddit posts showing how GTA V has more details and effects than in Cyberpunk and how that's so bad for Cyberpunk. If games are expected to constantly look more and more detailed and be punished if they don't, do you really think games will follow the idea of being more compressed?
The even more telling thing about those old Halo models is that the "rough" edges are really only noticeable when you sit their staring at them. In the heat of action during actual gameplay, a player isn't going to be focusing so intently on those minute details, making higher poly counts on newer games only seem like more wasted space.
games in the past - 9 gb great story, awesome characters, world worth remembering games now - 300gb not worth nor the disk space nor the money wide as an ocean deep as a puddle
Your description of games being large on purpose to prevent players from having multiple games installed, reminds me of some insect mating behaviors/evolutions where, after mating, the male plugs or blocks the reproductive tract of the female to prevent other males from mating with her. Also reminds me of some simian strategies, that involves killing the current baby of the female, so she'll be available to have young sooner, so that the baby killer has a chance of knocking her up (orangutans ?). Basically, Triple-A studios are looking to the weird and messed up mating strategies in nature, for strategies to keep players playing their game.
I just want to say that there are plenty of places in the United States where download speeds are ridiculously bad at best and unusable at worst. I grew up in rural Michigan not far from more urban areas, and downloading a game from the internet often meant installing it across multiple days while no one else was using the internet. The worst part is that my family had (still has) the fastest internet possible in our area, and I was considered lucky by my friends. Most people at my high school did not have internet routers and relied on mobile data for internet. I remember when a bunch of these kids got the xbox one, they had to do the initial system set-up at friends' houses or with their limited mobile hot spots (if they even had one). Fortunately, most single-player games of this generation contained the full game on the disc and only needed the internet for DLC or updates. Many of my closest friends never had access to online multiplayer until early adulthood. One of my friends still uses a limited mobile hot spot for all of his multiplayer and has to take his console to someone else's house for updates. Back in 2015, he actually got the xbox one that came with Halo MCC, but he never installed the game until 2020. Another one of my friends would take his xbox to his church to update (yes, his church). Going to a more important topic, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a lot of students in my area were severely disadvantaged, and some who were low income had to receive physical assessments by mail. I was attending community college at the time, and all of my stuff was online. Sometimes, when I had to do a test, my whole block's internet was down, so I would drive 25 minutes to the college parking lot and use its WIFI. One class required me to upload videos of me presenting stuff, so I needed to upload the stuff from my cell phone with data because my internet would've take a full day. Don't let anyone try to tell you that fast internet is just the norm now. There are still plenty of people in well developed countries that do not have such a privilege.
Incorrect. Daggerfall is still in the top five, but it has been beaten by four games. Microsoft Flight Simulator is roughly 32,000 times bigger. And then Minecraft, Elite: Dangerous, and No Man's Sky are effectively infinite in size.
A aspect that’s overlooked is the industry’s self destructive practices. Firing and durning out the older devs and are left with younger more inexperienced devs. So there was never a transition of knowledge so we have games that can’t be fixed or simple methods that are lost to time
That programming analogy was an excellent comparison. I never really thought about it but in a way using classes to create objects in something like Java is pretty similar to how file compression works!
In all honesty, I wonder how far we are before storage space, processing power, graphics, etc are high enough that new improvements and ceilings are less and less needed. Obviously we aren't there yet, but considering the fact that stuff like 8k to 16k are probably going to be the highest resolution any average person is going to need (I believe after 16k there isn't even a perceptible difference for the eye) , definitely shows a possibility of a possible slowdown of bigger storage space and processing needed. There's only so much information you actually need to have to not only have a game, but really to do just about anything the average person is going to be doing.
You underestimate the power of marketing. People still buy IPhone despite last generation was almost the same. Just manipultating gaming community for constant replacements is normal now. NVidia, I am talking about you.
I play a game called space engineers. Basically the premise is that you engineer... in space. I know, shocker. You build ships and stations and crap, all that good stuff. I noticed a difference between how I build things in survival, versus how I build things in creative. In survival I have to consider things like resource cost, power source, mass, and fuel. I have to build things smarter because I might not have enough resources for a 10 mile long conveyor system to transport bullets to my guns at the front of the ship. I can't build a ship that weighs 13 million tons because it would require more thrusters to move it, which in turn would require more reactors and more hydrogen. I can't build a gigantic box of heavy armor plates and call it a ship because those armor plates are expensive and, well, heavy. I think this is a similar situation to how games are developed now. Back when developers had to consider the limits of the current data storage mediums they were working with, they made sure to use as little as possible, compress everything as much as possible, and make it fit. Now that they don't have to worry about storage space, they can just make their games as large as possible. They don't have to build smart to make it work. They essentially have unlimited resources to work with, and so they build things carelessly and wastefully.
13:00 - WoW was already doing this in 2004 through the "rested" mechanic, in which a character racks up a certain amount of bonus experience from being logged out or spending time in an inn or city. The bonus experience is unlocked by killing monsters. Back then it had no microtransactions, but it was a subscription game.
¡yess! this video makes me feel very good about these things that i am trying out in my current game prototypes (as of 2023-08-18): • save sounds at the lowest quality setting (which most of the time doesn't sound any worse than the highest quality setting. and even if it does, only in a side-by-side comparison) • play single music instrument sounds using animation events rather than pre-rendering the music in a DAW • use shaders or polygons (rather than textures) to create simple shapes
This was the video I was looking for. Excellent commentary on subject often overlooked but hugely crucial. Before I got my current job I couldn’t afford to buy an external hard drive for my xbox. All the games were getting bigger and bigger, to pin rod where I could only have between 5-10 games installed at one time. I recently got a 2 terabyte hard drive and it is liberating. I also enjoy playing on PC, but I have an older laptop from 2017 that still runs on an i5 processor and I don’t even know what my gpu or cpu is. I’m forced to play smaller games because my hard drive of only 270 GBs is already practically full, and it’s not like I can play any AAA games because my low end $700 laptop can’t run them. Oh well. I’ve always thought that developers either knowingly or unknowingly made their game sizes larger to force gamers to chose which games they would play, forcing out competition. Each game got larger to compete for our hard drive space. It’s pretty anti-consumer. I hate that word “consumer”, makes me think of being the degenerated “global citizens” of Wall-E.
I feel you. I have 2 TB across a 1TB SSD for installed programs and a 1TB HDD for storage. I also have about 7TB external HDD space, but it's all filled with music production files (remember how he said uncompressed sound files take up tons of space? Imagine a music producer who collects this stuff, it gets insane), videos, and games in storage to be installed later. I was recently given Halo MCC as a gift but if I uninstalled all games from my main SSD, I'd barely be past halfway to having enough space for it. I'm trying to compress a lot of videos to make up for it, but I might have to delete some other games I've collected, which is pretty sad.
This is not touching on the real issues at all. While the increase in texture sizes seems reasonable because of geometric scaling, it's actually not nearly as big as you think. Look at Crysis remastered, a 12 GB game with textures being increased in the remaster from sometimes as low as 512px to 8K. It barely doubled in size. This is exactly because of compression. And texture compression does not increase loading times as GPU's can read compressed textures directly, so they don't need to be decompressed at all. Large 4K cutscenes can increase storage space dramatically, but unless it's final fantasy a game will typically not have that many. Uncompressed audio is a thing, but this was not for loading times, physically loading a massive sound file is going to be exponentially slower than decompressing a smaller file. Compressed audio is designed to be streamed directly from the disk at very fast rates. The game that popularized the idea of sound being exclusively to blame was Titanfall, where the reasoning was to save less than 1% CPU time on laptops by not compressing the audio. They traded loading speed and disk space for an insignificantly slight fps boost. The REAL reason is laziness. It used to be games would load content from a shared library of files. As in Crysis, where the same textures are used throughout the game, loaded from a shared library that every level uses. Before Steam Pipe, every source engine game would share content, from Half-Life 2 up through Portal. A combined install of every source engine game was much smaller than you'd think because of this. Modern games however have gotten lazy, every level file contains now a redundant copy of every single piece of content needed for that level. Every texture, model, animation, sound, and script is duplicated for that level. With dozens of levels this means dozens of duplicated files bloating the game. This does reduce loading times a small amount on spinning disks, by making the files coherent on the disk. But on SSD's this advantage goes away. The majority of loading time is not simply copying files from disk to memory, but rather pre-processing steps like generating procedural geometry, initializing vast arrays of data, instantiating objects etc. Things that are demanding on the CPU. Increasing disk speed and file coherence will have a minimal effect on this time. And why are they lazy? Because they can. They still have tool chains optimized for loading files on ps360, with their snail speed optical media and cheap hard drives, slow CPU's and minimal memory, where large BD and DVD capacities meant redundant files were preferable to overloading the CPU and disk speeds. Everything had to be tightly packed in linear archive formats and no data could be shared for optimal loading speed. Now they have fast internet, large disks, and no physical media to worry about. So they simply leave files unoptimized using their old techniques, which creates a ballooning file size. And the tight deadlines and budgets mean they cannot possibly dedicate any resources to fix it, unless larger entities like Sony step in as in the case of Killzone.
The main reason companies are making bigger games is because of market pressure. You mentioned this but I'd argue it's far more a factor than it seems. Like, let's say The Last of Us 3 comes out on PS5 and Naughty Dog says "hey, since we are on PS5. We don't have to use doors and other such tricks and compressions to slow the player down. The world loads instantly. Isn't that amazing!". Now if Batman Arkham Reboot comes out and uses them anyway, many players and RUclipsrs would complain that Rocksteady isn't taking advantage of the new tech and are being outdated. This would push other companies to aim bigger regardless if it's actually more inconvenient in the long run. We already see examples of this happening with other games. Games like Mass Effect Andromeda were blasted for not having cutting edge graphics. And there are countless videos and reddit posts showing how GTA V has more details and effects than in Cyberpunk and how that's so bad for Cyberpunk. If games are expected to constantly look more and more detailed and be punished if they don't, do you really think games will follow the idea of being more compressed? I also don't think your F2P conspiracy holds much water seeing as only Warzone is the only F2P game taking over 100 GB while the other popular ones like Fortnite and Apex take up less than 50 GB. And some like Destiny even reduced 50 GB after going F2P.
What you're saying is right, but I do think that new gen games should at least have good graphics, Unlike nintendo who are making mobile graphics games and selling them at $70. I don't think that a game like Pokemon with rehashed gameplay and extremely poor graphics should be priced the same metro exodus which so much time gone into detailing under the blatant excuse of "Graphics Don't matter and people who say such things are stupid".
@@ChanakyanStudent7971 There's a middle ground between shitty graphics and having to sacrifice your first born child in order to install a new game. You can have better graphics without necessarily exploding the size of games, just use compression.
not only should they be smaller, there's also a huge increase in amount of VRAM games require, that should not exponentially grow, the visual gains dont make up for this and we're then forced to keep upgrading gpus to match the level of perfomance sadly.. and all of that comes down to $$$
You don't and it is. I use a 1080p monitor and I can barely see the pixels as it is. You just don't need all this extra detail unless you're examining it with a magnifying glass. Looking at the wall next to me, I can see little bumps at half a metre, but at double the distance, they're barely visible and completely invisible at three times that. Much better to design the texture for viewing at 2m distance and then use detail textures for adding in details that'll only be visible when you're walking into the wall. Your textures would be a quarter of the dimensions and 1/16th the file size, and you can use the same detail texture for multiple surfaces. Use a bit of shader programming and you can add a "detail map" which could assign different detail textures to different parts of a main texture. I've tried it, and it definitely works, though the environment I was using only allowed 4 total texture samplers, so I was only able to use 2 detail textures.
I wish game devs went more with iconic art-styles (think Team Fortress 2 or Deep Rock Galactic) and less over-the-top realism like most games nowadays. Special artstyles are hard to forget, rarely (if ever) age, and give the game identity. 15 years from now, I'd still remember Team Fortress 2, but I sure will forget COD: MW2. I can replay Borderlands 2 15 years from now and it'd still look good to me, but the technological advancements would make The Last of Us II, a generally looker of a game, look like crap. It cuts down heavily on costs and space, makes games innovative and stand out, but why do that when you can just make trying-to-be-realistic game #26514?
14:00 I've never heard or considered this intentional-space theory, but it sounds plausible. I also think that bloat has become more accepted in the tech industry now is a contributing factor as well. 16:34 I think that there were likely several useful size-optimization methods for "modern" 3d engine games that were developed during the 6th & 7th gen consoles that have now become lost to time. Most AAA textures nowadays seem to be hastily slapped together in Substance with little regard for system constraints, whereas in the days of tight hardware constrains, devs _had_ to find clever ways to re-use or re-purpose data.
They choke out your hardware space and prevent you from downloading any others. This forces you to stay on the same game for longer; due to less variaty unless you decide to delete one of your mainstay choices.
12:45 says it all. I’ve been gaming since the early 2000s. Seeing these battle royale and free-to-play casino shooters is hurting gaming. Old IP’s are now cashcows. Pathetic.
I don't think it holds any water though. Only one F2P game, Warzone, is over 100 GB. Every other popular one (e.g Fortnite, Apex etc) is around 30-50 GB. Way less than the current AAA game's average of 78 GB. If using high storage space was such a viable tactic, we would see these F2P games actually take up more storage. Some like Destiny 2 actually removed 50 GB of content after going F2P. I think Occam's Razor is the more likely reason. Rather than Be some conspiracy to take up more storage, games are larger because audiences demand more detailed games. F2P games generally aren't as big because they don't have as many high quality assets
This is the worst time to live in student housing with bad internet that blocks digital gaming retailers. Downloading AAA titles with a VPN is an absolute pain.
I'm working on a game. The only reason this matters is that I've figured it out. Use LODs, but divide them into separate files. This needed engine changes, to source data from multiple asset files. Under Steam, what you want is to make it DLC. If I patch the original game, DLC will update in lockstep. It's free and optional, and optional is the whole idea. Next is GPU super-compressed textures. You get ~40% savings (4 bits / texel to 2.0-2.5 bits / texel). You decompress from the super-compressed texture to a standard GPU-readable format like BC1, in a compute shader. Third would be making the game locale-agnositic. You'd make specific flags for censorship. One for blood, etc. Include a string table keys. Include no audio, or textures with words in them. The game has keys into a table of translated messages, with the table provided by a locale file. Ensure that audio is compressed, because raw PCM is huge.
the size of modern games, on pc particularly, has put me off from getting new releases. i find myself looking at games from the previous generation i misse out on
They're likely doing it for slimey reasons, it's preventing consumers from buying more games from competition, encouraging players to keep playing and not buying more. pretty lowly thing to do. But a lot of this is reliant on speculation and a borderline conspiracy theory maybe it's actually just because they want better graphics on their games. At the same time, we shouldn't put it past them.
And this is one of the problems that I will not like about gaming now! is how video games now are getting more bigger which can be a problem if you have a gaming console. That has such small and limit storage and you wouldn't be able to put your game in your gaming console unless you delete some games in order to play that new game you gotten That has so much storage! which it does makes me miss when gaming consoles before would have so much storage and will allowed you to put as many games you want.
Ive been saying this for a while now but people seems to care little due on low or null likes... devs could make 1080p textures as base product then implement an UHD or bigger texture patch as optional to be installed for snobs with high rigs because mid and lower are getting hampered and limited on ssd disk space on their rigs to the point to even 500gb is barely enough for OS and 1 game only. Which is stupid.
Not sure if its comparable but i would guess alot of bloat is also inneficient code. I used to program for cnc and whenever you code using a software that has to compile down to just bare g code the program includes all kinds of garbage. Eg numbering lines and specifying coordinates that didnt change or feedrates that didnt change. Which we would have to manually remove because the machines had very small storage and all that crap would quadruple the file size.
I think it's an antipiracy tactic, personally. On 2nd thought, it may even promote piracy, to be honest. Pirate a game, and you don't even have to consider a refund if the game sucks, just delete it and you're no worse off than before.
Funny things about Divinity OS 2, the game is actually around 20gb in size, the reason why the definitive edition weights about 46gb is because the game files has both the DE and the classic edition files, even though the game DOES NOT USE THE LATTER. So basically, you can delete the entire classic folder, free 20gbs in storage and still play the normally.
It sucks. I finally updated to the Xbox Series S and it came with 500gb internal storage. I downloaded MW2 and I can only fit Rocket League on there as a secondary game. I have an external hard drive, but I can't play X/S games off of it, so I would have to transfer MW2 over the the hard drive and the other game I want to play back to internal. It should be 2TB minimum!!
Developers are squaring the amount of space and effort for a square root of improvement. Arkham Knight looks fantastic nowadays and it’s almost a decade old.
i think the golden period where we had a good balance loaded content (like visuals and mechanics) and resonable storage size was the ealy to mid 2010s. like 2008~2015. like sunset overdrive 30gb, saints row 4, 10gb, dmc: devil may cry 17gb , metal gear rising revengance 24gb, black ops 2 10gb all these games look great, had a lot of content packed into it and dont take up that much space and no look not all that bad compared to current gen games. like compare sunset overdrive to spider man. sure there are some obvious short falls that sunset has compared to spider man but the looks and the content are pretty similar and yet one is 40gb more than the other.
That’s because it didn’t have traditional loading screens, a common way to hide them is through elevators, or really any similar room that’s completely closed off from everything else. Think the airlock in Cairo Station, or the underwater gondolas on Delta Halo.
Though to be fair, you don't have all that content that is available to you downloaded It's more like an "All You Can Eat" buffet, you pick what weapons, npcs, maps you want, ect. But yes, GMod is very spectacular in it's available content...When the workshop isn't being flooded by nextbots or cursed stuff of course!
i dont think the big players are in any way pressuring the console makers to have reduced HDD size seeing as they sell the consoles at a loss and make it up with game sales, if this HDD space monopoly the game makers are pulling, it in turn means less money for the console makers and thus a conflict of interest
The market for low end devices is massive, companies like RIOT and Garena make most of their money from low end players, they may not spend much but they are loyal and they manage to keep a steady flow of cash with them, one example is Free Fire, is the most popular game in my country every kid plays it on their low end android devices, devices that rarely have more than 4GB ram and this kids are mad loyal i have seen many save money every season to buy the battle pass or try to keep up with not the most expensive content but they buy some skins cause that gives you bragging rights wiht their comunity, Garena has managed to keep the game under the 2GB mark and that is impressive but quite effective cuase as i said every kid with an android phone can play the game and have fun with their friends and the graphics aren't like super realistic but they are good enough, i think many top studios are kinda elitist and don'tn want nothing to do with this kind of players since they won't spend 1000$ month on skins and weapons but if you get 1000 players willing to spend 1 dolar a month in your game those 1000 will tell their other 2 or 3 friends about how awesome your game is and in the end you have 4000 user spending 1$ or even more in your game meanwhile the other companies have to do anything to keep that one lone whale player.
I think unironically, that Triple A studios in the long run, are going to be shooting themselves in the foot. If you're goal for you're free to play game is to get as many players as possible. More people to potentially buy stuff, more people for you're whales to fight. You would be better off with a compact but effective sized game. Because partly the points you make: Not everyone can download 100 gig game that is no better than the game 10 years ago. Cause of internet.... or space... or literally just not wanting to go through the pain of having a 100 gig game on your computer. So you naturally just limit you're player base, in the hopes that you can grab enough of the more well off players who are willing to go through the pain of getting the game. A 10 gig game in comparison, is very acceptable to alot of players, pretty easy to download (even with slower internets), is acceptably large for a very good game. Force constriction of size forces you're team to work on making the best out of the size. And PR wise, you legit can say "A game made for players, by players" and boom. Also as a long time gamer, I personally don't care about graphics. Like Halo CE graphics are acceptably epic graphics for me, and Id rather have a very smooth, complex but fun MP or SP game with those graphics. Than a game that looks 1000% realistic as if you're actually seeing someones head being ripped off but I also need to use my whole drive to even download it. And I have to wait days for it to download at even moderate speeds...
Not even mentioning that these one (s)hit wonder games that Triple-A publishers have been pushing out are all unnoteworthy in all aspects except how atrocious they are People to this day are still playing games like Halo CE because those games were designed intelligently, phenomally, they were built to be fun first and score where they need to They don't waste their time on things that don't matter, they know what people want in games, people want something _fun_ And honestly, i think if i ever were to introduce someone to games, i _would_ start with something like Halo CE
Supply, demand, and yes market pressure. If im selling ice pops and youre selling ice pops, and you have a flavor i dont, ima go and find that flavor and sell it too. Doesnt matter if the majority of both our sales will be blue flavor, because we have to compete, and your wider selection could draw more folks in, so i make my packaging more colorful and force you to do so, driving production costs up, even though again, everyone just wants a good ole blue otter pop. A good game is a blue ice pop, and all the next gen stuff is about competition, like the packaging. Its not for the games and the gamers, but its for the market, and any edge is an edge.
This why handhelds and gaming rigs are winning one has smaller games and physical game not taking storage space because cartridges the other has endless storage capacity.
from the way to help reduce game size down looking to the past will help, but pushing forward with Microsoft direct storage and supposedly with the ps5 data will be pulled from the drive straight to the GPU instead of going from the drive to the CPU then to the GPU cutting down load times with the possibility of improving frames by allowing the hardware to have less info loaded in the background as they can now get it from the drive much faster as to not need it constantly loaded in the back taking up performance
I think another factor comes in - games are also released unfinished, barely tested, hardly optimized and basically a rough product... Perhaps they honestly just don't have enough time to actually do what's needed, and they end up with a heavy game with allot of shovel-data in it, and probably zero concern over user experience and hardware, due to them rushing the game out to get the deadline goal. AAA development is not efficient at all.
You're not telling the whole story with those Halo models. Yes, the models may be the same, but games back in the Xbox one days would use just one texture map - the diffuse map. Modern PBR lighting systems have different requirements: you need the diffuse (i.e. albedo) map, a normal map, and a roughness/metalness map. On top of that, you're going to need pre-integrated cubemaps. Those extra textures are where a lot of the size increase comes from, not from the vertex count of the models. Take into account that they've been redone in a much higher resolution, and these assets are using *much* more memory than the originals. They also didn't "just hold up" - it took a significant amount of work to get them looking the way they do.
A little late to this vid, but yeah games are crazy big now. I have a Series X, and the console is great. Games load fast, sometimes too fast haha, and games look fantastic. I mainly play Halo MCC (120gigs) and Modern Warfare (209gigs) which is almost half of my storage at the moment. I have to delete games when new ones come out, and I don't want to spend $200 for an extra 1000gigs of Xbox approved storage right now. Nice vid muh guy.
Glad to be playing stalker shadow of chornobyl which is 5,8 gigs for 20 hours and still ain't near the end credits. And I do have a decent pc but I just prefer playing old games with graphic mods. I think it's soul and not that performace-demanding textures that attracts me to it.
Are there any good indie TFPS games? As a TFPS player my options are extremely limited and the only good TFPS-games I can think of are Valorant, Counter-Strike, Rainbow 6, and the Payday games. Valorant and Counter-Strike are PC exclusive, meaning that they are FILLED with cheaters. Counter-Strike especially with the release of Counter-Strike 2 requires a graphics card and I don't think consumers will have access to GPUs for much longer seeing as Nvidias expected to become the worlds most profitable company due to the fact that GPUs have so much use outside of gaming. Rainbow 6 does have a console release, but it doesn't support KB&M, and any FPS game that wants to be seen as competitive needs KB&M support. The Payday games do have console ports, but they are very, very limited. Payday 3 drops in about a month and I hope it keeps up-to-date with the PC version and supports KB&M although KB&M isn't as important in a 4 player Co-op TFPS then it would be in a defusal game.
Yet most still don’t give you half the options Deus Ex (released in 2000) does. So tired of graphics and marketing being prioritized over actual gameplay.
5:40, The compression your describing of referencing data in a dictionary (lz77) doesnt store anything separately as the dictionary is the last encoded few kb/mb, as similar stuff is likely to be together. 6:22, Modern compression does not affect (and possibly speeds up loads by a small amount) due to decompressing faster than a SSD read (specifically, oodle and zstandard). 6:41, When everything is low res, that has absolutely nothing to do with compression, thats a gpu bandwidth issue. Actually, textures are often left in their gpu formats on disk due to the low compression gains compressing them actually gives. 7:00, ALL video files ALWAYS are compressed, because this video uncompressed alone would be 398 gb at 1080p. 7:24, This is almost universally false and stems from a dumb decision made in titanfall 1
2:24 I agree with the video, but what? DOS2 is massive. It's download size could absolutely be lowered, but saying that it's size is unjustified is simply laughable
if it keeps up, nobody will be able to even install a game unless they put a whole terabyte of storage in and uninstall every game on it. it's counterproductive and plain stupid. if i wanted a game for 100 or so gigs, i'd install the mcc. at least i can play other halos instead of 1 of them.
Thanks everyone who's stuck around, waiting for this one. Currently working on my next video right now, so stay tuned, its going to be a big one.
Is the video going to be in TikTok format, otherwise I will not be watching due largely to its irrelevancy.
@@Nedzberry No sorry probably not relevant enough.May be worth just skipping it if its not in any tik tok compilations.
Developers are taking a very brute-force approach to detail by just making bigger textures. It's not necessary. There are techniques like detail textures, which was an option in the original Unreal and made a big difference there, or better still, procedural content, which can be absolutely tiny, can avoid tiling if desired and can potentially be evaluated at any resolution if designed right.
CN you elaborate more on these techniques?
@@ARStudios2000 Sure.
Detail textures are probably the easiest to understand. You make textures of things like wood grain, grass blades, metal and stone up close, convert to greyscale, and adjust the brightness level so it averages 50%. That averaging is critical. You want it so that if it gets scaled down via mip-mapping that it'll end up at 50% brightness when it hits 1*1 size. When combined with the main coloured texture at a smaller size, it'll add the details to it, taking the colour from the main texture, and as you get further away, the mip-mapping will make them fade out.
It's a very cheap way to add more detail to your game world. A handful of small greyscale textures can add details to many much larger ones without the need to use buckets of disk or memory. You can fit 32 256*256 colour textures into 8MB of memory, but you can only fit two 1024*1024 ones. If your detail textures are 128*128, then you can fit 16 of them into the space of one of your 256*256 colour textures, and you're probably going to have a hard time coming up with that many unique detail textures for the entire game as they tend to be readily reusable.
Procedural content involves specifying your content as a process the computer can follow to make it. While it's pretty well-known for its use in making randomised levels, it can be used to make anything.
The classic 2004 tech-demo .kkreiger implements a single level of an FPS with Doom-3-quality visuals in just 96KB by storing everything as procedural instructions that are used to build everything at load time. The approach taken by .kkreiger does mean it requires a fair bit of RAM (512MB), but it's also entirely possible to do your texture generation at render-time, as many, many shaders on ShaderToy demonstrate. There's even a couple that recreate the visuals from classic games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, including a playable version of the first level of Doom!
It's actually easier to design a procedural texture that never tiles than one that does. You basically take spatial coordinates as an input, do some operations on them, and spit out a colour. Noise combined with a sine function and an absolute-value operation can make a passable marble, for instance. Making it tile requires adding some additional operations to make space repeat and prevent seams. It's also trivially easy to make something look like it was carved out of a material with such textures, too.
Because they're evaluated based on spatial coordinates (and maybe temporal ones as well), the detail you can get out of procedural textures is limited only by what you include in the functions you use to specify them. Hell, you could probably do procedural detail textures to save on GPU number-crunching if necessary.
I'm actually rather rusty on the graphics side of things right now. My experimentation with procedural content has been focussed on sound and making sound effects in PureData lately. If you want a book recommendation on the topic, take a look at "Designing Sound" by Andy Farnell.
Halo CE and the Source engine also has some form of detail texturing too IIRC. It's pretty cool
@@Roxor128 we made us of procedural generation for our Games fleadh entry this year. Our working title was "this game does not exist". Really love it as an approach to development.
textiling?
Devs suck at optimizing their games. Most games aren't even worth the 100 gb file size. There's literally no excuse for any game to even go past 100gb.
ngl 10 years ago if a game was 50gb I'd assume it had so much content it would take you years to finish it.
Nowadays most 50gb games are like 3 hours long and have a few achievements basically
We're going backwards
meanwhile the 35mb indie game you got for twenty bucks can last you for the rest of your life
Similar to your example with Jak and Daxter, I feel a good example of seamless load times is within the Batman Arkham games. At no point in the game do you get placed in a load screen. This leads to unrivaled immersion, how the developers did it was by slowing down game play, for instance, having Batman having to open vents and crawl through them at a slower pace.
The problem is going forward, I think many players will become wise to these tricks and start to complain about them. Especially as other companies start to brag about how they they won't do them with SSDs.
Like, let's say The Last of Us 3 comes out on PS5 and Naughty Dog says "hey, since we are on PS5. We don't have to use doors and other such tricks to slow the player down. The world loads instantly. Isn't that amazing!". Now if Batman Arkham Reboot comes out and uses them anyway, many players and RUclipsrs would complain that Rocksteady isn't taking advantage of the new tech and are being outdated. This would push other companies to aim bigger regardless if it's actually more inconvenient in the long run.
We already see examples of this happening with other games. Games like Mass Effect Andromeda were blasted for not having cutting edge graphics. And there are countless videos and reddit posts showing how GTA V has more details and effects than in Cyberpunk and how that's so bad for Cyberpunk. If games are expected to constantly look more and more detailed and be punished if they don't, do you really think games will follow the idea of being more compressed?
@@FraserSouris I heard Andromeda got blasted more so because its animations were just utter dogcrap.
@@thevgmlover The animations themselves are mostly par with past ME games
That's only knight. Asylum,city and origin had tons off loading screens.
@@FraserSouris Maybe now (including when you typed your comment) after the updates, but at launch? Heck no.
The even more telling thing about those old Halo models is that the "rough" edges are really only noticeable when you sit their staring at them. In the heat of action during actual gameplay, a player isn't going to be focusing so intently on those minute details, making higher poly counts on newer games only seem like more wasted space.
Games in 2025
Storage needed: 16TB
my 3.5 megabytes per second internet is going to die
@@Hamza22490 welp ur screwed
@@Hamza22490 what a privileged guy. I have a limit of downloading 20GB per month. 😎
@@iwatchDVDsonXbox360 20GB PER MONTH!? I didn't even know it was possible to get past 1mb per year.
games in the past - 9 gb
great story, awesome characters, world worth remembering
games now - 300gb
not worth nor the disk space nor the money
wide as an ocean deep as a puddle
100mb games - Fun & challanging (FNaF)
300 GB games - we put our effort in graphics not gameplay.
@@Fangamer1254 BG1 and 2 togheter take up around 10 GB
Your description of games being large on purpose to prevent players from having multiple games installed, reminds me of some insect mating behaviors/evolutions where, after mating, the male plugs or blocks the reproductive tract of the female to prevent other males from mating with her.
Also reminds me of some simian strategies, that involves killing the current baby of the female, so she'll be available to have young sooner, so that the baby killer has a chance of knocking her up (orangutans ?).
Basically, Triple-A studios are looking to the weird and messed up mating strategies in nature, for strategies to keep players playing their game.
zeebras do the baby strategy
The killing babies conduct also happen in the lions
you are being gangstalked!!!
Bro just say they are fucking with us
@@luisapaza317and in israel
I just want to say that there are plenty of places in the United States where download speeds are ridiculously bad at best and unusable at worst. I grew up in rural Michigan not far from more urban areas, and downloading a game from the internet often meant installing it across multiple days while no one else was using the internet. The worst part is that my family had (still has) the fastest internet possible in our area, and I was considered lucky by my friends. Most people at my high school did not have internet routers and relied on mobile data for internet. I remember when a bunch of these kids got the xbox one, they had to do the initial system set-up at friends' houses or with their limited mobile hot spots (if they even had one). Fortunately, most single-player games of this generation contained the full game on the disc and only needed the internet for DLC or updates.
Many of my closest friends never had access to online multiplayer until early adulthood. One of my friends still uses a limited mobile hot spot for all of his multiplayer and has to take his console to someone else's house for updates. Back in 2015, he actually got the xbox one that came with Halo MCC, but he never installed the game until 2020.
Another one of my friends would take his xbox to his church to update (yes, his church).
Going to a more important topic, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a lot of students in my area were severely disadvantaged, and some who were low income had to receive physical assessments by mail. I was attending community college at the time, and all of my stuff was online. Sometimes, when I had to do a test, my whole block's internet was down, so I would drive 25 minutes to the college parking lot and use its WIFI. One class required me to upload videos of me presenting stuff, so I needed to upload the stuff from my cell phone with data because my internet would've take a full day.
Don't let anyone try to tell you that fast internet is just the norm now. There are still plenty of people in well developed countries that do not have such a privilege.
How is this not trending? You have great editing skills a good mic actual facts and you are really good at explaining things! Keep up
Probably because people think that "bad mic" = "bad video", just like "bad graphics" = "bad game"
A lot of this file size inflation has to do with cut, unused, or inaccessible content that devs are too lazy to crop out of the game files
😮
Or just keep for players to have fun finding these.
Especially due to the use of stock engines.
unpaid dlcs are downloaded alongside regular content wheather u like or not
Speaking of the Elder Scrolls, I believe Daggerfall still has the largest in-game open world map, despite being ~500MBs.
HOW!?
@@danielsurvivor1372 procedurally generated and very repetitive
Incorrect. Daggerfall is still in the top five, but it has been beaten by four games. Microsoft Flight Simulator is roughly 32,000 times bigger. And then Minecraft, Elite: Dangerous, and No Man's Sky are effectively infinite in size.
Your vids deserve more love, I'll be spreading it as much as I can
Thanks for the love bro. Glad you checked out my channel.
I'm not sure why you're not more popular. Very well put together ideas and videos. Good mellow personality. Definitely subscribing
A aspect that’s overlooked is the industry’s self destructive practices. Firing and durning out the older devs and are left with younger more inexperienced devs. So there was never a transition of knowledge so we have games that can’t be fixed or simple methods that are lost to time
That programming analogy was an excellent comparison. I never really thought about it but in a way using classes to create objects in something like Java is pretty similar to how file compression works!
In all honesty, I wonder how far we are before storage space, processing power, graphics, etc are high enough that new improvements and ceilings are less and less needed. Obviously we aren't there yet, but considering the fact that stuff like 8k to 16k are probably going to be the highest resolution any average person is going to need (I believe after 16k there isn't even a perceptible difference for the eye) , definitely shows a possibility of a possible slowdown of bigger storage space and processing needed. There's only so much information you actually need to have to not only have a game, but really to do just about anything the average person is going to be doing.
4k is already the resolution of the human eye. Any higher just allows one to sit closer and closer to the screen.
You underestimate the power of marketing. People still buy IPhone despite last generation was almost the same. Just manipultating gaming community for constant replacements is normal now. NVidia, I am talking about you.
I play a game called space engineers. Basically the premise is that you engineer... in space. I know, shocker. You build ships and stations and crap, all that good stuff.
I noticed a difference between how I build things in survival, versus how I build things in creative. In survival I have to consider things like resource cost, power source, mass, and fuel. I have to build things smarter because I might not have enough resources for a 10 mile long conveyor system to transport bullets to my guns at the front of the ship. I can't build a ship that weighs 13 million tons because it would require more thrusters to move it, which in turn would require more reactors and more hydrogen. I can't build a gigantic box of heavy armor plates and call it a ship because those armor plates are expensive and, well, heavy.
I think this is a similar situation to how games are developed now. Back when developers had to consider the limits of the current data storage mediums they were working with, they made sure to use as little as possible, compress everything as much as possible, and make it fit. Now that they don't have to worry about storage space, they can just make their games as large as possible. They don't have to build smart to make it work. They essentially have unlimited resources to work with, and so they build things carelessly and wastefully.
13:00 - WoW was already doing this in 2004 through the "rested" mechanic, in which a character racks up a certain amount of bonus experience from being logged out or spending time in an inn or city. The bonus experience is unlocked by killing monsters. Back then it had no microtransactions, but it was a subscription game.
¡yess!
this video makes me feel very good about these things that i am trying out in my current game prototypes (as of 2023-08-18):
• save sounds at the lowest quality setting (which most of the time doesn't sound any worse than the highest quality setting. and even if it does, only in a side-by-side comparison)
• play single music instrument sounds using animation events rather than pre-rendering the music in a DAW
• use shaders or polygons (rather than textures) to create simple shapes
This was the video I was looking for. Excellent commentary on subject often overlooked but hugely crucial. Before I got my current job I couldn’t afford to buy an external hard drive for my xbox. All the games were getting bigger and bigger, to pin rod where I could only have between 5-10 games installed at one time. I recently got a 2 terabyte hard drive and it is liberating. I also enjoy playing on PC, but I have an older laptop from 2017 that still runs on an i5 processor and I don’t even know what my gpu or cpu is. I’m forced to play smaller games because my hard drive of only 270 GBs is already practically full, and it’s not like I can play any AAA games because my low end $700 laptop can’t run them. Oh well.
I’ve always thought that developers either knowingly or unknowingly made their game sizes larger to force gamers to chose which games they would play, forcing out competition. Each game got larger to compete for our hard drive space. It’s pretty anti-consumer. I hate that word “consumer”, makes me think of being the degenerated “global citizens” of Wall-E.
I feel you. I have 2 TB across a 1TB SSD for installed programs and a 1TB HDD for storage. I also have about 7TB external HDD space, but it's all filled with music production files (remember how he said uncompressed sound files take up tons of space? Imagine a music producer who collects this stuff, it gets insane), videos, and games in storage to be installed later. I was recently given Halo MCC as a gift but if I uninstalled all games from my main SSD, I'd barely be past halfway to having enough space for it. I'm trying to compress a lot of videos to make up for it, but I might have to delete some other games I've collected, which is pretty sad.
This is not touching on the real issues at all. While the increase in texture sizes seems reasonable because of geometric scaling, it's actually not nearly as big as you think. Look at Crysis remastered, a 12 GB game with textures being increased in the remaster from sometimes as low as 512px to 8K. It barely doubled in size. This is exactly because of compression. And texture compression does not increase loading times as GPU's can read compressed textures directly, so they don't need to be decompressed at all. Large 4K cutscenes can increase storage space dramatically, but unless it's final fantasy a game will typically not have that many. Uncompressed audio is a thing, but this was not for loading times, physically loading a massive sound file is going to be exponentially slower than decompressing a smaller file. Compressed audio is designed to be streamed directly from the disk at very fast rates. The game that popularized the idea of sound being exclusively to blame was Titanfall, where the reasoning was to save less than 1% CPU time on laptops by not compressing the audio. They traded loading speed and disk space for an insignificantly slight fps boost.
The REAL reason is laziness. It used to be games would load content from a shared library of files. As in Crysis, where the same textures are used throughout the game, loaded from a shared library that every level uses. Before Steam Pipe, every source engine game would share content, from Half-Life 2 up through Portal. A combined install of every source engine game was much smaller than you'd think because of this. Modern games however have gotten lazy, every level file contains now a redundant copy of every single piece of content needed for that level. Every texture, model, animation, sound, and script is duplicated for that level. With dozens of levels this means dozens of duplicated files bloating the game. This does reduce loading times a small amount on spinning disks, by making the files coherent on the disk. But on SSD's this advantage goes away. The majority of loading time is not simply copying files from disk to memory, but rather pre-processing steps like generating procedural geometry, initializing vast arrays of data, instantiating objects etc. Things that are demanding on the CPU. Increasing disk speed and file coherence will have a minimal effect on this time.
And why are they lazy? Because they can. They still have tool chains optimized for loading files on ps360, with their snail speed optical media and cheap hard drives, slow CPU's and minimal memory, where large BD and DVD capacities meant redundant files were preferable to overloading the CPU and disk speeds. Everything had to be tightly packed in linear archive formats and no data could be shared for optimal loading speed.
Now they have fast internet, large disks, and no physical media to worry about. So they simply leave files unoptimized using their old techniques, which creates a ballooning file size. And the tight deadlines and budgets mean they cannot possibly dedicate any resources to fix it, unless larger entities like Sony step in as in the case of Killzone.
I'm a GBA dev. We're limited to 16 MB storage size.
The main reason companies are making bigger games is because of market pressure. You mentioned this but I'd argue it's far more a factor than it seems.
Like, let's say The Last of Us 3 comes out on PS5 and Naughty Dog says "hey, since we are on PS5. We don't have to use doors and other such tricks and compressions to slow the player down. The world loads instantly. Isn't that amazing!". Now if Batman Arkham Reboot comes out and uses them anyway, many players and RUclipsrs would complain that Rocksteady isn't taking advantage of the new tech and are being outdated. This would push other companies to aim bigger regardless if it's actually more inconvenient in the long run.
We already see examples of this happening with other games. Games like Mass Effect Andromeda were blasted for not having cutting edge graphics. And there are countless videos and reddit posts showing how GTA V has more details and effects than in Cyberpunk and how that's so bad for Cyberpunk. If games are expected to constantly look more and more detailed and be punished if they don't, do you really think games will follow the idea of being more compressed?
I also don't think your F2P conspiracy holds much water seeing as only Warzone is the only F2P game taking over 100 GB while the other popular ones like Fortnite and Apex take up less than 50 GB. And some like Destiny even reduced 50 GB after going F2P.
What you're saying is right, but I do think that new gen games should at least have good graphics, Unlike nintendo who are making mobile graphics games and selling them at $70.
I don't think that a game like Pokemon with rehashed gameplay and extremely poor graphics should be priced the same metro exodus which so much time gone into detailing under the blatant excuse of "Graphics Don't matter and people who say such things are stupid".
destiny had to remove all of the content before shadowkeep to get the filesize down, and it still gets to about 90 gb sometimes
I mean Apex is nearing 100 GB SOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo. 🤷
LMAO, as if studios listened to the gamers.
@@ChanakyanStudent7971 There's a middle ground between shitty graphics and having to sacrifice your first born child in order to install a new game. You can have better graphics without necessarily exploding the size of games, just use compression.
You deserve so much more love. These analytical videos are some of my favourite on RUclips and you're one of my favourite channels.
not only should they be smaller, there's also a huge increase in amount of VRAM games require, that should not exponentially grow, the visual gains dont make up for this and we're then forced to keep upgrading gpus to match the level of perfomance sadly.. and all of that comes down to $$$
Who in the world needs 4k textures for a video game? I think 4k is just a marketing tool.
You don't and it is. I use a 1080p monitor and I can barely see the pixels as it is. You just don't need all this extra detail unless you're examining it with a magnifying glass.
Looking at the wall next to me, I can see little bumps at half a metre, but at double the distance, they're barely visible and completely invisible at three times that. Much better to design the texture for viewing at 2m distance and then use detail textures for adding in details that'll only be visible when you're walking into the wall. Your textures would be a quarter of the dimensions and 1/16th the file size, and you can use the same detail texture for multiple surfaces. Use a bit of shader programming and you can add a "detail map" which could assign different detail textures to different parts of a main texture. I've tried it, and it definitely works, though the environment I was using only allowed 4 total texture samplers, so I was only able to use 2 detail textures.
I wish game devs went more with iconic art-styles (think Team Fortress 2 or Deep Rock Galactic) and less over-the-top realism like most games nowadays. Special artstyles are hard to forget, rarely (if ever) age, and give the game identity. 15 years from now, I'd still remember Team Fortress 2, but I sure will forget COD: MW2. I can replay Borderlands 2 15 years from now and it'd still look good to me, but the technological advancements would make The Last of Us II, a generally looker of a game, look like crap.
It cuts down heavily on costs and space, makes games innovative and stand out, but why do that when you can just make trying-to-be-realistic game #26514?
14:00 I've never heard or considered this intentional-space theory, but it sounds plausible. I also think that bloat has become more accepted in the tech industry now is a contributing factor as well.
16:34 I think that there were likely several useful size-optimization methods for "modern" 3d engine games that were developed during the 6th & 7th gen consoles that have now become lost to time. Most AAA textures nowadays seem to be hastily slapped together in Substance with little regard for system constraints, whereas in the days of tight hardware constrains, devs _had_ to find clever ways to re-use or re-purpose data.
“Western game dev was here”
“How can you tell?”
“108 gb”
They choke out your hardware space and prevent you from downloading any others. This forces you to stay on the same game for longer; due to less variaty unless you decide to delete one of your mainstay choices.
Dang, this was 3 years ago. Imagine the storage space we need now.
Funny how cod has been going crazy on size, polygons, texture, and resolution. And barely anyone is walking about how high the graphics are
Games are becoming way too big that it would make the industry unsustainable for developers and gamers.
12:45 says it all. I’ve been gaming since the early 2000s. Seeing these battle royale and free-to-play casino shooters is hurting gaming. Old IP’s are now cashcows. Pathetic.
Damn, piloting that banshee with m&k is just unnatural looking. It turns sooooo fast
This was top notch, thanks for creating it. Really interesting take on f2p, made me think!
I don't think it holds any water though. Only one F2P game, Warzone, is over 100 GB. Every other popular one (e.g Fortnite, Apex etc) is around 30-50 GB. Way less than the current AAA game's average of 78 GB. If using high storage space was such a viable tactic, we would see these F2P games actually take up more storage. Some like Destiny 2 actually removed 50 GB of content after going F2P.
I think Occam's Razor is the more likely reason. Rather than Be some conspiracy to take up more storage, games are larger because audiences demand more detailed games. F2P games generally aren't as big because they don't have as many high quality assets
games are way larger than they need to be and attempt to look better than they need to as well
This is the worst time to live in student housing with bad internet that blocks digital gaming retailers. Downloading AAA titles with a VPN is an absolute pain.
here before 1k views, get this trending
ive got a 200 gig harddrive. i get to choose 2 games to play at a time! yipee!
I'm working on a game. The only reason this matters is that I've figured it out. Use LODs, but divide them into separate files. This needed engine changes, to source data from multiple asset files. Under Steam, what you want is to make it DLC. If I patch the original game, DLC will update in lockstep. It's free and optional, and optional is the whole idea.
Next is GPU super-compressed textures. You get ~40% savings (4 bits / texel to 2.0-2.5 bits / texel). You decompress from the super-compressed texture to a standard GPU-readable format like BC1, in a compute shader.
Third would be making the game locale-agnositic. You'd make specific flags for censorship. One for blood, etc. Include a string table keys. Include no audio, or textures with words in them. The game has keys into a table of translated messages, with the table provided by a locale file.
Ensure that audio is compressed, because raw PCM is huge.
9:29 With these last three you really can't even tell unless you give them a solid stare-down.
the size of modern games, on pc particularly, has put me off from getting new releases. i find myself looking at games from the previous generation i misse out on
Why can't games ship with 720p textures and you download/install higher res ones at will.
Valheim is a great game to see the combo of low poly and modern lighting tech
i prefer the humble games that take up little space
They're likely doing it for slimey reasons, it's preventing consumers from buying more games from competition, encouraging players to keep playing and not buying more. pretty lowly thing to do. But a lot of this is reliant on speculation and a borderline conspiracy theory maybe it's actually just because they want better graphics on their games. At the same time, we shouldn't put it past them.
How does this vid not have more views? I honestly thought this was a large channel until i look at the views, likes, comments ect
And this is one of the problems that I will not like about gaming now! is how video games now are getting more bigger which can be a problem if you have a gaming console.
That has such small and limit storage and you wouldn't be able to put your game in your gaming console unless you delete some games in order to play that new game you gotten
That has so much storage! which it does makes me miss when gaming consoles before would have so much storage and will allowed you to put as many games you want.
In a couple of years, hard drives with games will be in stores to replace conventional DVDs.
Ive been saying this for a while now but people seems to care little due on low or null likes... devs could make 1080p textures as base product then implement an UHD or bigger texture patch as optional to be installed for snobs with high rigs because mid and lower are getting hampered and limited on ssd disk space on their rigs to the point to even 500gb is barely enough for OS and 1 game only. Which is stupid.
Quantum break Exipode pack is 75.61GB just own its own
A very thoughtful video. Worthy of a greater level of discussion
Had to buy a extra 500 gig drive off of amazon to have more than 3 PS4 games available at once!
9:06 These look really good for their age (guess that's what they get for making efficient use of their triangles...)
i remember when Halo 4 came out and there was that Disc 2 thing you had to use for other content
Not sure if its comparable but i would guess alot of bloat is also inneficient code. I used to program for cnc and whenever you code using a software that has to compile down to just bare g code the program includes all kinds of garbage. Eg numbering lines and specifying coordinates that didnt change or feedrates that didnt change. Which we would have to manually remove because the machines had very small storage and all that crap would quadruple the file size.
Like this video let's get this dude recognized
Found your channel with your Halo saved FPS video, love your videos man.
Of course it's mostly just because of HD textures.
Take Fallout 4 as an example, before HD texture: 35GB, after HD texture: over 95GB.
Jesus after watching this i thought you'd have at least 200k subs and over 500k views
Just make a console standard with 1000 TB as default 64 gives around games so 1000 TB will give you 65,000 games 🎱
I think it's an antipiracy tactic, personally. On 2nd thought, it may even promote piracy, to be honest. Pirate a game, and you don't even have to consider a refund if the game sucks, just delete it and you're no worse off than before.
Funny things about Divinity OS 2, the game is actually around 20gb in size, the reason why the definitive edition weights about 46gb is because the game files has both the DE and the classic edition files, even though the game DOES NOT USE THE LATTER. So basically, you can delete the entire classic folder, free 20gbs in storage and still play the normally.
In the near future we are going to need 1000 TB hard drive
It sucks. I finally updated to the Xbox Series S and it came with 500gb internal storage. I downloaded MW2 and I can only fit Rocket League on there as a secondary game. I have an external hard drive, but I can't play X/S games off of it, so I would have to transfer MW2 over the the hard drive and the other game I want to play back to internal. It should be 2TB minimum!!
Developers are squaring the amount of space and effort for a square root of improvement. Arkham Knight looks fantastic nowadays and it’s almost a decade old.
i think the golden period where we had a good balance loaded content (like visuals and mechanics) and resonable storage size was the ealy to mid 2010s. like 2008~2015. like
sunset overdrive 30gb, saints row 4, 10gb, dmc: devil may cry 17gb , metal gear rising revengance 24gb, black ops 2 10gb
all these games look great, had a lot of content packed into it and dont take up that much space and no look not all that bad compared to current gen games.
like compare sunset overdrive to spider man. sure there are some obvious short falls that sunset has compared to spider man but the looks and the content are pretty similar and yet one is 40gb more than the other.
OG Halo 2 had seamless loading and there was no loadibg screens other than cutscenes.
That’s because it didn’t have traditional loading screens, a common way to hide them is through elevators, or really any similar room that’s completely closed off from everything else. Think the airlock in Cairo Station, or the underwater gondolas on Delta Halo.
And my god, why the hell do games need 20gb update patches?! Just send the changes, I dont need the whole bloody file!
This is a fabulous upload and answered questions that have been bugging me for ages. Very informative.
I am actually making a game engine. I have decided to compress and prioritize the lighting
I can download Gmod in 2 seconds and have thousands more hours of content than I would in CODMW.
personally i hate the fact that gams now are huge
Though to be fair, you don't have all that content that is available to you downloaded
It's more like an "All You Can Eat" buffet, you pick what weapons, npcs, maps you want, ect.
But yes, GMod is very spectacular in it's available content...When the workshop isn't being flooded by nextbots or cursed stuff of course!
Correction: flops are floating point operations PER SECOND. Whcih means 3.4 teraflops is 3.4 trillion floating operations per second
i dont think the big players are in any way pressuring the console makers to have reduced HDD size seeing as they sell the consoles at a loss and make it up with game sales, if this HDD space monopoly the game makers are pulling, it in turn means less money for the console makers and thus a conflict of interest
The market for low end devices is massive, companies like RIOT and Garena make most of their money from low end players, they may not spend much but they are loyal and they manage to keep a steady flow of cash with them, one example is Free Fire, is the most popular game in my country every kid plays it on their low end android devices, devices that rarely have more than 4GB ram and this kids are mad loyal i have seen many save money every season to buy the battle pass or try to keep up with not the most expensive content but they buy some skins cause that gives you bragging rights wiht their comunity, Garena has managed to keep the game under the 2GB mark and that is impressive but quite effective cuase as i said every kid with an android phone can play the game and have fun with their friends and the graphics aren't like super realistic but they are good enough, i think many top studios are kinda elitist and don'tn want nothing to do with this kind of players since they won't spend 1000$ month on skins and weapons but if you get 1000 players willing to spend 1 dolar a month in your game those 1000 will tell their other 2 or 3 friends about how awesome your game is and in the end you have 4000 user spending 1$ or even more in your game meanwhile the other companies have to do anything to keep that one lone whale player.
Call of duty takes storage space because it wants to be what you only play
I think unironically, that Triple A studios in the long run, are going to be shooting themselves in the foot.
If you're goal for you're free to play game is to get as many players as possible. More people to potentially buy stuff, more people for you're whales to fight. You would be better off with a compact but effective sized game. Because partly the points you make: Not everyone can download 100 gig game that is no better than the game 10 years ago. Cause of internet.... or space... or literally just not wanting to go through the pain of having a 100 gig game on your computer.
So you naturally just limit you're player base, in the hopes that you can grab enough of the more well off players who are willing to go through the pain of getting the game.
A 10 gig game in comparison, is very acceptable to alot of players, pretty easy to download (even with slower internets), is acceptably large for a very good game. Force constriction of size forces you're team to work on making the best out of the size. And PR wise, you legit can say "A game made for players, by players" and boom.
Also as a long time gamer, I personally don't care about graphics. Like Halo CE graphics are acceptably epic graphics for me, and Id rather have a very smooth, complex but fun MP or SP game with those graphics. Than a game that looks 1000% realistic as if you're actually seeing someones head being ripped off but I also need to use my whole drive to even download it. And I have to wait days for it to download at even moderate speeds...
Not even mentioning that these one (s)hit wonder games that Triple-A publishers have been pushing out are all unnoteworthy in all aspects except how atrocious they are
People to this day are still playing games like Halo CE because those games were designed intelligently, phenomally, they were built to be fun first and score where they need to
They don't waste their time on things that don't matter, they know what people want in games, people want something _fun_
And honestly, i think if i ever were to introduce someone to games, i _would_ start with something like Halo CE
Supply, demand, and yes market pressure. If im selling ice pops and youre selling ice pops, and you have a flavor i dont, ima go and find that flavor and sell it too. Doesnt matter if the majority of both our sales will be blue flavor, because we have to compete, and your wider selection could draw more folks in, so i make my packaging more colorful and force you to do so, driving production costs up, even though again, everyone just wants a good ole blue otter pop. A good game is a blue ice pop, and all the next gen stuff is about competition, like the packaging. Its not for the games and the gamers, but its for the market, and any edge is an edge.
*a few QoL changes and bug fixes*
[40 GB update]
This why handhelds and gaming rigs are winning one has smaller games and physical game not taking storage space because cartridges the other has endless storage capacity.
Crazy how Halo 3 still looks quite good with the exception of some blocky models, and the character's faces.
from the way to help reduce game size down looking to the past will help, but pushing forward with Microsoft direct storage and supposedly with the ps5 data will be pulled from the drive straight to the GPU instead of going from the drive to the CPU then to the GPU cutting down load times with the possibility of improving frames by allowing the hardware to have less info loaded in the background as they can now get it from the drive much faster as to not need it constantly loaded in the back taking up performance
I think another factor comes in - games are also released unfinished, barely tested, hardly optimized and basically a rough product... Perhaps they honestly just don't have enough time to actually do what's needed, and they end up with a heavy game with allot of shovel-data in it, and probably zero concern over user experience and hardware, due to them rushing the game out to get the deadline goal.
AAA development is not efficient at all.
Why we need to bring back "Lite" games
You're not telling the whole story with those Halo models. Yes, the models may be the same, but games back in the Xbox one days would use just one texture map - the diffuse map. Modern PBR lighting systems have different requirements: you need the diffuse (i.e. albedo) map, a normal map, and a roughness/metalness map. On top of that, you're going to need pre-integrated cubemaps.
Those extra textures are where a lot of the size increase comes from, not from the vertex count of the models. Take into account that they've been redone in a much higher resolution, and these assets are using *much* more memory than the originals. They also didn't "just hold up" - it took a significant amount of work to get them looking the way they do.
I have a 2TB SSD and now I have 912GB
Edit: I now have 590GB left
What did ya download which took up soo much space?
A little late to this vid, but yeah games are crazy big now. I have a Series X, and the console is great. Games load fast, sometimes too fast haha, and games look fantastic. I mainly play Halo MCC (120gigs) and Modern Warfare (209gigs) which is almost half of my storage at the moment. I have to delete games when new ones come out, and I don't want to spend $200 for an extra 1000gigs of Xbox approved storage right now. Nice vid muh guy.
Copying from and to an external SSD is pretty fast. 1000X faster then deleting and downloading.
Glad to be playing stalker shadow of chornobyl which is 5,8 gigs for 20 hours and still ain't near the end credits. And I do have a decent pc but I just prefer playing old games with graphic mods. I think it's soul and not that performace-demanding textures that attracts me to it.
I hate it how games these days are taking too much space even with additional space via Xbox Seagate expansion card and SD card for my Nintendo Switch
Are there any good indie TFPS games? As a TFPS player my options are extremely limited and the only good TFPS-games I can think of are Valorant, Counter-Strike, Rainbow 6, and the Payday games. Valorant and Counter-Strike are PC exclusive, meaning that they are FILLED with cheaters. Counter-Strike especially with the release of Counter-Strike 2 requires a graphics card and I don't think consumers will have access to GPUs for much longer seeing as Nvidias expected to become the worlds most profitable company due to the fact that GPUs have so much use outside of gaming. Rainbow 6 does have a console release, but it doesn't support KB&M, and any FPS game that wants to be seen as competitive needs KB&M support. The Payday games do have console ports, but they are very, very limited. Payday 3 drops in about a month and I hope it keeps up-to-date with the PC version and supports KB&M although KB&M isn't as important in a 4 player Co-op TFPS then it would be in a defusal game.
does framerate affect game size ? I suspect not, since a lot of X360 got a framerate upgrade on XSX without size increase.
GTA 6 size gonna blow world 🌎
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Yet most still don’t give you half the options Deus Ex (released in 2000) does.
So tired of graphics and marketing being prioritized over actual gameplay.
5:40, The compression your describing of referencing data in a dictionary (lz77) doesnt store anything separately as the dictionary is the last encoded few kb/mb, as similar stuff is likely to be together.
6:22, Modern compression does not affect (and possibly speeds up loads by a small amount) due to decompressing faster than a SSD read (specifically, oodle and zstandard).
6:41, When everything is low res, that has absolutely nothing to do with compression, thats a gpu bandwidth issue. Actually, textures are often left in their gpu formats on disk due to the low compression gains compressing them actually gives.
7:00, ALL video files ALWAYS are compressed, because this video uncompressed alone would be 398 gb at 1080p.
7:24, This is almost universally false and stems from a dumb decision made in titanfall 1
2:24 I agree with the video, but what? DOS2 is massive. It's download size could absolutely be lowered, but saying that it's size is unjustified is simply laughable
You're literally contradicting yourself
if it keeps up, nobody will be able to even install a game unless they put a whole terabyte of storage in and uninstall every game on it. it's counterproductive and plain stupid. if i wanted a game for 100 or so gigs, i'd install the mcc. at least i can play other halos instead of 1 of them.