I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don’t need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it’s a 2D game, but it’s a beautifully-presented one.
Animal Well has a 35mb install according to Steam.
Games like that have nothing to prove. The product speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, games that take up 300gb of your disk often do this purposefully. In the case of console games, they know it will monopolize your system. The game usually isn’t even enjoyable, but it’s too big to delete randomly, so you gaslight yourself into committing to it
each cod game also costs around 450 million dollars to make, so i can’t help but imagine that some of the file size bloat is caused by a need to “justify” the budget in some way. because as we all know, 300gb games have so much more game when compared to a measly 60gb game. you won’t be getting dynamically sized horse balls in a game that only takes up 60gb.
is rdr just 60gb?
it’s 120gb which is less than i was expecting but still way too much. i have no idea what the call of duty games could possibly be doing to justify 240gb. its utterly insane. that’s more than like 4,500 times the size of quake 1.
i think its mostly high res skins and hats
Aka: CoD. I honestly still don’t understand how people can justify to themselves the $70 price point for each game, or the sheer ridiculous size of the fucking thing. It’s gotta be mental gymnastics, right? Are they really that good that people will overlook the bullshit like shitty launchers and Warzone bleeding into how the games play nowadays?
Their target market is young teenagers who don’t care about that stuff
Animal Well is a staggering work of art on multiple fronts, not least of which is the code golf required to keep its size so small. Incredible game.
whatever you do, don’t look into its code.
It’s basically a single lua file with more if/else/switch nesting than god intended
(unless it was refactored in the last couple months)
Why not? In the same way you don’t need amazing art to make a fun game, you don’t need amazing code either. If the game is fun then it’s a success.
Im surprised it’s that much given how simple the graphics are.
Liibraries with their dependencies can take up a fair bit of that space easily these days. I dunno how many would be used in a game like that but that’d be my guess for the space needed.
I redownloaded Stardew Valley last night and was amazed to find it’s still less than a Gigabyte.
I know it’s not the same as a hyperrealistic 3D game, but I’m still amazed at how much stuff he keeps adding, but it hasn’t even scratched a GB.
Pixel art is very space efficient. Thats how pixel art originally came about, back when computers/consoles/cabinets didn’t have memory for bigger textures, or the capability to even display the full resolution and colour palette of the monitor/tv within the time of one frame.
is that why Minecraft is so popular?
Hehe yeah, the whole game is the size of one objects collection of textures in some other games.
Game’s size depends on many factors. Besides devs’ laziness or the abundance of inique assets and dupes, I had a fun ride with Vermintide 2 whose devs were able to cut game’s size from 100gb+ to 60gb+ at once because they added all incrimental updates as additional archives and also prefered to have all assets for one level in one place even if they are shared, so it grew out of proportion over the years before they decided to cause a complete asset restructurement and dublicate hunt before the major update. It made players redownload big chunks of the game but resulted in a way less terrifying size to those players they wanted to start it or return into.
Downloaded factorio yesterday at a wopping ~1.5 gig
What game is this?
Have noticed western devs typically can’t reduce file size for shit. Something like killing floor 2 is 97 gigs and elden ring (last i looked) was under 50
My guess would be cod
TBF Maple story is 40gb today. The game is 2d.
I miss the days when you could choose to stream most of the large assets directly from the CD, because taking up 600MB on your hard drive was too much to ask for.
I don’t miss those loading times though; for better or worse, SSDs have changed the game (no pun intended).
Valheim, a massive open world filled with interesting monsters and beautiful stylistic graphics is 1gb
to be fair, the 4k textures etc take up most of the space in large 3d games. valheim has a low poly and low quality textures style with a lot of repeats. it only looks good thanks to lighting.
with such a design choice you have an unfair advantage over photorealism and large variety.
we should however compare different games of the same style. did they use the 8k ulta detailed Hamburger models or did they actually think about Ressource and space management ?
It’s also, as tons of people have said about the Arkham series, about art style. The Valheim style looks really good because they have incredible artists working on the game.
Just like Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen even though it’s almost 9 years old, Valheim will still probably look just as good the same amount of time later.
Well we had to use the 10k triangle toothbrush model, no two ways about it! (/s/)
The high resolution bristles were necessary to prevent plague to the teeth of the characters, from the microscopically 3d scanned streptococci.
I agree. We’re not the first ones to point it out, but theres a strong argument to be made for graphical style over graphical fidelity. Working to achieve a particular stylised choice tends to give a visual medium greater longevity.
There’s a reason why people remember details about Jurassic Park over something like Avatar; or Star Fox over the latest Call of Duty.
Technology has made some things look better over the years, but the things that really get remembered visually are the style choices.
Just because one game takes up a quarter of your hard drive doesn’t make it more impressive than a sub 1 GB game.
When games get this big it merely ensures that they get uninstalled the moment I lose a bit of interest.
On the + side, this keep HDD sales up, which would otherwise have dropped low enough for most consumer facing markets to shut down long before the rise of home made NAS devices
What 8GB. Some of the best games ever fit in a floppy disk (a real life save icon for the gen z people around here).
A floppy? How many copies of kkreiger do you need?
I need the rest of the space for my humongous demos collection.
The first section of my disc box was for demos. The rest for games. The games sometimes got overwritten, but the demos never got sacrificed, because those were hard to get.
These days I just go to pouet.net and watch the YouTube clips. I know, it’s a ridiculous procedure to stream megabytes of video to watch a 100kb demo run, but I just can’t be bothered to make my pc run anything by itself anymore.
Transport Tycoon.
Although that may have been 3 floppies.
Back in high school i had a floppy with an NES emulator and several games. Was able to play nes game on school computers. Never got caught doing that lol
Lmao, I didn’t know someone could be condescending about floppy disc’s, but here we are.
It’s a joke and I didn’t intend it to be condescending.
What’s that FPS someone made to be as small of a file as possible? It’s like a Quake rip-off, but the game runs as a single executable and is small enough to barely take up the space of a floppy disk (like just a few kilobytes)?
Hell yeah :D
Doom
(/s)
8gb is probably a bit too small for most photorealistic style games at maximum settings, but maybe they should introduce optional games asset support to steam. No point downloading the full resolution textures if you’re playing on low texture settings.
Yeah, alot of games in their own launchers have that option, but bought through steam don’t, steam needs a clean way of supporting multiple install formats, I guess.
They do it through the dlc mechanism just fine. Halo is an example of this.
Halo lets you choose to not install the 4k textures in steam? And they use the dlc system to present that option? That doesn’t sound like it would be super clear. But I’ll check it out and see. Which halo?
No point in playing that game lmao
ARK?
There are plenty of 8GB games, we need to lower our expectations.
you don’t get 4k with matching textures and pre-lit levels the size of texas for free.
Go back to 8GB and 3-4 year releases
So what you’re saying is that we need more ray traced games. Don’t have to waste a bunch of space pre-baking lighting when it’s calculated in realtime!
That helps. We are heading that way. But as a whole we’re just chasing the prettiest most expensive graphics. Nobody gives a damn how the game plays or how it performs. Or demanding huge worlds, Hi-Rez, high refresh rate, and then bitching about it.
Reject modernity, Return to Zork
