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A 2003 complaint about Half-Life
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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This is as much of a valid complaint now as it was back then.
There is absolutely no excuse for games now to be over 100GB in storage space. Unless you have the longest game ever that span across like 1 and a half "normal" game lengths. The biggest games now should be 60GB or less. So many developers refuse to compress things that could be compressed with zero noticeable loss in quality except for maybe a camera being really close to an object with an 8k display resolution.
At the absolute worst, do what games used to do for like 6 months before not caring: make the game for 1080p players, compression and all, then offer a free DLC with all the uncompressed stuff. At least make the storage feast optional.
even 60GB is absurd, tons of games get by just fine with like 10GB while having no lack of content and graphics.
Nah, I understand a AAA game being up to 60GB. Sometimes the amount of content really is that big. Elden Ring, for example. Its a big game with a lot of content, and its pretty close to 60GB I think. And yes, Morrowind has explorable space probably equally as big as Elden Ring for just 1GB. But compared to Elden Ring, Morrowind is like an empty barren wasteland. Maybe Elden Ring's landmass data could have reduced filesize if it used prodecurally generated mesh if it doesn't already, but in the end I think 60GB and under is fine.
While indie games can easily fit under 10GB because they are tiny or 2D, I get why bigger AAA games can't.
The most annoying thing is there is a trivial to implement way to close to halve these stupidly inflated sizes: make the highest resolution of textures a free DLC that you optionally install
/c/YourCommentButStroke
A lot of that is shadows and lighting data, sometimes in unusual data structures without readily available compression methods. Compressing textures also impacts load times, obviously decompressing 10gb of jpgs could take a while. Still probably there are good compression methods and good tradeoffs to make, if any AAA studios actually cared about storage space (They do care a lot about GPU memory, just not storage space).
I wish games would release with low/medium, up to 1024x1024 textures and stuff by default and let people choose to download/install higher res stuff. If I'm not going to use the 4k pack, I don't need it sitting on my hard drive
I mean, if the base game folder is .8 Gb, then aren't their 3 mods the 1 Gig culprit? That's a moddev issues and not many are concerned about optimizations.
Edit: I did misread the bit about the original game size.
Reminds of the those shitty Battlefront Remasters with upscaled 8 or 4k textures or whatever it was. Games went from being less than 5gbs to being 60 gb or something like that.