An Issue With Modern PC Games

[HerrBobo]

Hi All,

Like many a PC gamer I am really looking forward to the upcoming (and now delayed)release of GTA V. A day or two I checked out the specs and I was please to see that my rig, which is a few years old now, falls somewhere in the middle of minimum and recommended. Then I saw that HD space needed was 65 gigs!! That can't be right I thought, GTA IV was only 16G San Andreas was only 3.5! I passed it off as a an anomaly, I know it is a huge game and all. Then I tried to install Company of Heroes 2- 35 Gigs!! The first one was 9!

Armed with this disturbing news I checked out my Steam folder I have 154 games, 15 of which are installed. Those 15 add up to a staggering 192.16 gigs of HD space.

The issue I have is not with HD space, I have 1TB, 2 if you cound my external.

It's bandwidth. Many of us, I believe have some sort of monthly download limit set by our provider. Not only that, but share that limit with flatmates or family. The next gen jump in games has made them huge, 100 gig games are not that far off. Why is the games industry allowing this to happen? The world is looking for products to be smaller, more efficient and neater. Game developers need to make that the next step, but those huge games in tighter bundles!

 

[Keoul]

Uhm kinda obvious isn't it? More content = More space
In "ye ole days" you could just fit all that onto a few CDs and you'd be fine, the whole not enough bandwidth problem is a pretty recent thing. I don't think you should be blaming the Game developers as much as you should be blaming the ISP who aren't keeping up with demand.

But hey it could just be because you refuse to upgrade your internet service to unlimited or go to a country with better internet. In China you get unlimited by default (though it's kinda slow).

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

The problem is that all these hyper-photorealistic games have textures that take up lots and lots of HD space. You can't have a 30-something grizzled white brown-haired soldier whose pores you can count individually without big, huge textures! (And don't even think about compression, lest the Glorious PC Master Race descend upon you to bludgeon you with their still-smoking $1000 graphics cards.)

Maybe if AAA developers gave up this mad quest to impersonate reality down to hand-designed cracks in the walls of that featureless corridor and started using our tremendous computing power for other things, like AI or sound design... but alas, those aren't things you can show off in a pre-order screenshot.

 

[Fappy]

Honestly, I don't think file size is really the issue at this point. It only makes sense that file sizes will get bigger and bigger as graphical fidelity improves and whatnot. I'd say the fault lies more with internet infrastructure being way behind the times. HDDs are getting cheaper and cheaper as the market share of SSDs grow, so "not enough memory" isn't really that big a deal... it's getting the data in the first place that seems to be the problem for most folks. As soon as we get improved infrastructure and ISPs drop their archaic BS we'll be good to go, imo.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

A lot of the issue is uncompressed audio. The audio files for the games are MASSIVE, and for big AAA games like GTA they tend to have the games voice acted in multiple languages, and you don't get the option of only downloading and installing one of those languages rather than all of them.

Max Payne 3 was 35 gigs 3 years ago, and was huge for its time. When I looked at the actual files I remember something like half the size of the game being audio files, and the game had voice acting in like 8 languages. If I had been given the option of only installing it with the English audio I would have saved myself around 10 gigs.

Not only that but Rockstar includes 2 different versions of their texture resources, high resolution and low resolution. No one uses both, people with good PCs use the high resolution texture resource pack, and people with mediocre computers use the low resolution pack, but regardless of which one you use you have to download both, which is more wasted space.

If developers just allowed you to do custom installs it would go a long way to solving the problem, but most don't because they're lazy and the way they code requires everyone to have all the exact same files on their computers.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Just buy a PS3/PS4 and then you'll never have to worry about upgrading it to run games .

I second this. Just buy a console and stop fretting about space, textures and compression.

 

[DoPo]

Just buy a PS3/PS4 and then you'll never have to worry about upgrading it to run games .

I second this. Just buy a console and stop fretting about space, textures and compression.

I've got a 500 gig drive, most of which I use for games and I've not got a problem with space. I currently legitimately have more games installed than I can ever play at one time (defined as a period of about a month and a half) just because I decided to try and install as many as possible to see how many would these be. And I didn't go for maximum possible, I just went for all the top ones I'm interested in.

But as OP stated, space isn't the problem. Why was it brought up?

 

[communist gamer]

It's mostly graphics really. The games that take up 60+ GB worth of space often dont have that much content, but may be packed with beutifull graphic, which takes up a crap ton of space. For example saint rows the third is at 9GB, Tropico 4 with all the addo ons/DLC sit at around 4-5 GB. Tropico has a lot more content, but has worse graphics and there are less animations to do, hence the difference, if you want a solution, just stick to indie games and older ones for a while, it should blow over soon

 

[jklinders]

Card carrying member of the PC gaming master race here. But I tend to value performance over the ability to count pores on a character model's face.

It's the eternal pissing match about who is offering the very best in uncanny valleyesque graphics. Throw in voice acting for every single character and textures fine tuned to the smallest detail whether needed or not and you are going to get bloat.

I never bothered checking the hard drive capacity of the newest gen of consoles but with more and more games needing to be installed on them I am thinking that in all likelihood there is not going to be enough. I was a little taken back by the jump in file size even though I expected it. Even maybe 2-3 years ago, games over 20 GB were the exception, not the rule. Now 30+ GB seems to be the norm.

I'm limping along sharing a 20 MB internet connection with my fiance and if I need to download a game it's usually best to do so overnight and hope that my wireless card doesn't overheat and shut down halfway through. I could upgrade to 40 MB for about 10 bucks/month but then I get a data cap which I currently don't need to worry about. I find this hilarious, as if I was not downloading more than 250 GB /month I would not need a farking 40 MB plan.

Having said the above, I am not excessively put out by the file sizes yet. However I think we are getting close to a tipping point where the return in visuals is not represented well by the cost of developing these textures and storing them.

 

[SoreWristed]

Since i got my ps4, i've seen the bandwith warning page more than i've ever seen it before. To be more accurate, 4 times in 4 months, while i've only ever seen it before when i was downloading 70 gigs of visuals i needed for work. I am an avid Netflix user so i stream a lot of things, but i would guess the main problem is that i bought some games on the psn store which immediately ate up the remainder of my download limit.It also doesn't help that every single game seems to have a 6 gig patch to be downloaded on release day. I'm switching providers in a few months for one that offers unlimited downloads anyway, but it did make me look at my ps4 with a frown for the second time in it's life.

 

[MetalShadowChaos]

Uhm kinda obvious isn't it? More content = More space
In "ye ole days" you could just fit all that onto a few CDs and you'd be fine, the whole not enough bandwidth problem is a pretty recent thing. I don't think you should be blaming the Game developers as much as you should be blaming the ISP who aren't keeping up with demand.

But hey it could just be because you refuse to upgrade your internet service to unlimited or go to a country with better internet. In China you get unlimited by default (though it's kinda slow).

Final fantasy 13 has roughly a quarter of the assets of GTA and is the same size. It isn't a case of 'more stuff = bigger', though that is surely a factor, it's that certain things are apparently too much of an effort to compress. Take Titanfall, which is 50 odd gigs just because of UNCOMRPESSED AUDIO FILES. You don't need to worry about it so much with consoles, you can pack the disk full and only start to compress stuff when you reach the Disk's limit, then when it comes to bringing it to PC the attitude is generally to just take everything from the disk and put it there with no regards to size.

That said, there is a small advantage to these huge sizes in terms of Performance. FF13 wouldn't run nearly as well if it wasn't that big. I'm not exactly a technical whiz though, so details escape me.

 

[MetalShadowChaos]

Just buy a PS3/PS4 and then you'll never have to worry about upgrading it to run games .

In stead, worry that if it doesn't work then you can do literally nothing about it until developers try and fail to fix it for you.

Unless it's WiiU. For some reason developers generally don't fuck things up as badly on there. If at all.

 

[Magmarock]

This is what happens when everything becomes net dependent. I have unlimited, but I understand why this is an issue. I am reminded of the "who doesn't have the internet" argument regarding DRM. The games industry simply has no respect for the consumer.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I have unlimited bandwidth so I don't care as much as some of you do.

GTA V isn't like this just because of very high-res textures like Shadow of Mordor. As you can see from the requirements, it doesn't require more than 2Gb of VRAM. This means that uncompressed audio is the most likely culprit alongside high-res textures.

My solution is simple. Valve and game developers should work together to allow us to download and install only one language when we download a game from Steam and only one texture pack that we plan to use. Games are getting too huge and internet providers aren't listening. They don't care. This would help people with limited bandwidth. Valve needs to step up their game this gen. Because if you can't buy from Steam anymore because your monthly bandwidth cap doesn't allow it, you'll buy from retail and then Valve will be losing money. Most games already allow you to delete unnecessary language files from installation folder without any issues whatsoever. I do that every time. I don't need Russian, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, French etc. audio files. That shit frees up at least 1Gb, and that's 1Gb of compressed audio. God only knows how much that would be if they didn't bother compressing it.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

If developers just allowed you to do custom installs it would go a long way to solving the problem, but most don't because they're lazy and the way they code requires everyone to have all the exact same files on their computers.

That's a neat idea, and I can't think of a good reason why they don't try to implement that in clients like Steam for when you download it. I usually do custom installs on regular programs, just to uncheck all the useless features and extraneous languages. They don't use up significant space, but doing that makes things install faster.

Just buy a PS3/PS4 and then you'll never have to worry about upgrading it to run games .

That's not the issue here. OP's is bandwidth and monthly data caps. The games are getting big regardless of whether your game box says Xbox, Sony, or Asus/MSI/Antec/Lian Li/etc. Console owners do have the advantage of being able to find almost every new game on optical disc, but even console owners who want to play online multiplayer has to suffer though increasingly huge updates. Then there's all the full game downloads Sony and MS are pushing, usually with some preorder bonus. Those are just as big as the PC equivalents.

It gets worse when you do other things online, too. Downloading or streaming music and video also puts some serious strain on bandwidth caps. If you have a stingy ISP and watch videos often and download any games (again on any box), you will be worried about getting hit with overage charges or getting throttled right when you have time to watch some Netflix or Youtube. I get worried sometimes, because I have Comcast, use Steam and buy things on PSN, and gave up the garbage on cable to watch stuff all across the internet.

Unless it's WiiU. For some reason developers generally don't fuck things up as badly on there. If at all.

Nintendo is the Apple of video games, even more than Apple is the Apple of PCs today (thanks to iOS stuff becoming their main product lines and some new OS X problems). They know their systems well, develop the most used software themselves and work closely with the few other developers to make solid code. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet if third parties were more interested, we would hear of more glitches in Wii U games, too.
Edit: screwed up spelling useless

 

[Javetts Eall Raksha]

graphics are a part of it. honestly better graphics at this point serves little purpose. games now have budges 10X what they use to (counting for inflation) and they're shorter then ever before. what percentage of this bandwidth usage is DRM making it's rounds? that'd be nice to know. most importantly though, if you have a high end computer and the newest games, you better have at least the second highest internet package available through your ISP.

 

[happyninja42]

I dunno, if the OP is commenting about how long it will take to download games of this size, I don't see how that's a big problem. My usual routine is to simply start a download before I go to bed, and when I wake up, it's ready to run. Problem solved.

 

[cikame]

I wish devs could bring the sizes down, the improvements to graphics arn't good enough to warrant the insane increase in file sizes.
Remember the Titanfall issue? 49GB, 35GB of which is uncompressed audio of various languages... that's pretty obnoxious, the game doesn't even have a full length story mode.

For reference i have a 4MB broadband connection, it takes me around a week to download modern games.