Larian has finally confirmed that preloading won’t be available, apparently because of a limitation with Steam.
What in the fuck. Can devs please start compressing this shit better? I know this is more of a me problem, but this is like half my SSD just for this game alone. Ridiculous.
I know this is more of a me problem
Naw naw fuck that fam, this is very much a them problem. 122gb is fucking ridiculous.
I was going to install CoD: Cold War from PS+ on my PS5 since I wanted to check out the campaign but I’d never buy it. Fuckin 230 GB for that shit. I lol’d a bit and moved on to something else. So ridiculous.
Lmao 230gigs fuck that. Sitting here cursing my own life because I have 10 gigs of Sims 4 mods. For 230GB the game better come with a hologram that pops out of a USB port to suck my fucking cock.
The only games I’ll bother keeping installed that are over 100gb are my ESO with all the addons on PC, and Star Wars Battlefront II on PS5, and only because my friends and I play co-op every Friday night. But it’s still ludicrous. My most played game recently, Battlebit Remastered, is a whopping 3 GB lol.
Just one more reason why the obsession with the latest greatest OMGWTF HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS is the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Atari Jaguar.
We can compress textures into ridiculously small sizes, I doubt it’s a problem. Audio on the other hand…
In a dialogue heavy game such as this one, each voice line for each language must be shipped with the game on steam. There’s no way to split the downloads between regions and languages from within developer console on steam.
I think it’s one of the most popular requests devs posted in the dev forums.
Standard lossless compression (without further assumptions) is already very close to being as optimal as it can get: At some point the pure entropy of these huge datasets just is not containable anymore.
The most likely savior in this case would be procedural rendering (i.e. instead of storing textures and meshes, you store a function that deterministically generates the meshes and textures). These already are starting to become popular due to better engine support, but pose a huge challenge from a design POV (the nice e.g. blender-esque interfaces don’t really translate well to this kind of process).
Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.
I’m sure that what can be compressed is compressed in these game files. What we really need is more intelligent assets. When downloading, the platform should take your localization settings and only download the assets required for that locale. I bet this would heavily reduce the size of many of these games.
I’d be willing to bet that the game will be available in a compressed format from a repack site with no content loss. At least 30% smaller. A recent example that I just checked, Forspoken, Original Size: 103.9 GB Repack Size: from 63.6 GB
Before I had an unlimited connection for monthly bandwidth usage I would frequently download an already purchased game from the repack site and then have steam “repair” it. Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War come to mind specifically. Saved so much of my limits at the time.
I don’t think that localization would help much. Most, probably all, assets that are taking up so much storage space are not going to include language directly.
It doesn’t. I was playing Anno 1800 recently and that one is like 90gb, I thought that also was the problem but even selecting only English to download still keeps the massive size. Completely absurd.
What they need to do is utilize steam’s branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.
The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have “great on deck” be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don’t need at 800p
yeah, I don’t want to fill my steamdeck with 4k res assets.
Eh… you can have high quality assets or you can have small size, but you can’t have both.
Game assets are typically some of the most heavily compressed assets there are (it’s often quicker, even from SSDs, to load a compressed asset and uncompress it than otherwise). There’s an entire middleware industry grown up around minimising asset sizes while keeping quality. 122 GB to me just screams “this game is fucking massive” rather than “this game is horribly unoptimised”.
Well then i hope phisical games come back to be a thing because i will never downlaod a 100gb+ game. They should make game in USB or Hardrive format that an user can buy at store like was with CD and DVD.
Honestly, things like this were why I thought that Blu-Ray drives would take off. It’s why I bought a Blu-ray RW drive in 2014 for my PC build because I thought it would be the future as game and media sizes would only get bigger and more of a pain to download.
I was wrong, but I wish I hadn’t been. At least I can rip my PS3 Blu-rays to play them on emulators now. It’s hard to go back and play them at 720p on a big screen without all the features that emulators give me. Rendering at 1440p (minimum) just being the start.
Soon or later the progress will gonna need to going back as new generation of physical disk-like. Also this depency on the net is simple unsafe, service can go offline anytime and hundred of dollars in game just become nothing. We should relearning the value of owning something really in our hands and not in virtual libraries.
Never? There’s that infamous quote about how people will never need more than 64KB of RAM that comes to mind. SSD prices are falling rapidly, and internet bandwidth is only increasing. I understand if you don’t have the means right this moment, but 100+ GB games are here and will only happen more often.
This would create excessive waste, and the EU would never approve of it.
I could see that happening if SSDs of that size drop below the $10 mark
Flash drives are already at that price point for consumers, let alone at manufacturing/bulk prices.
Seems like Australia gets screwed with these types of things more than other first world nations. Even a lot of third world countries have better speeds on average than Australia. Even then though with a 50mbps connection you can just download it overnight or start it before you leave for work and you’ll be good to go.
You guys beat us at most things, but at least we have the Bledisloe, and fibre internets
Why do people care?
I mean, yes, all else held equal, I’d rather have a video game two days earlier or whatever, but this is way down the list of things I’d get worked up about.
Hell, the
crowd waits for at least a year after release, at which point all the patches and whatnot are normally out, often sales are on, hardware to run a game tends to be cheaper, and often people have done substantial work on game wikis and the like. I can understand someone not wanting to wait for a year, but who can’t handle a day or two?
EDIT: Or let me put another perspective on it. The release date is essentially arbitrary from a player’s standpoint. Suppose some serious bug had shown up late in development – which could easily have happened – and that release date had been pushed back by five days. I doubt that anyone would have said anything, even though they would have gotten their hands on the game several days later. But the inability to preload making that same game show up playable a couple of days later has articles being written complaining about it. Why? The delay happens either way.
One delay is for everyone, the other is for those with slow connections.
I can totally understand how people would be mad that they can’t take part while their friends and communities have already started digging in.
That’s insane. Let me get it on some kind of physical media.
I smell poorly compressed textures/media at resolutions much higher than most people need.
Come on, Larian. Be better.
remember when devs actually tried to FUCKING COMPRESS THEIR FILES AND NOT MAKE THE GAME NEEDLESSLY MASSIVE
So glad I just invested in a 20TB disk for this kind of shit. Got so tired of uninstalling and reinstalling games to manage space.
Good thing I just recently upgraded my internet connection to a full gigabit.
Cries in 8Mbps down
Where is Pied Piper when you need it!