HDD space eaters

[Da Orky Man]

Twas the evening of April 27th. The Orky Man had just bought Max Payne 3, courtesy of the 75% off Steam sale. Upon having confirmed the purchase, he merrily went along to my game list to install is digital prize, expecting a moderate download time and file size.
And lo, he encountered a 30gb game file size. So, having calmly and in moderation screamed out 'BLOODY FUCKNUGGETS!!!' for all the world to hear, h did press upon the 'Next' button and prepared himself for a long 1 Day 9 Hour install.

http://imgur.com/iSRqbTU

And so, the Orky Man is here to ask you, fellow Escapees, what surprises - pleasant or otherwise - have you had with game sizes/requirement?

EDIT: Da Orky Man has also noticed that his image has crapped out. He apologizes for this, and offers a direct link.

 

[triggrhappy94]

Battlefield 3. For the 360, you have to download all the HD stuff to play online, which is a couple gigs.

 

[shrekfan246]

Oh yeah, that's one of the biggest reasons I've no interest in checking out Max Payne 3 myself.

I've had quite a few unpleasant surprises with PC games in the last few years. Just to name a few:
The Mass Effect trilogy + DLC takes up something around 46 GB on my hard drive.

The Witcher 2 takes up just over 20 GB.

Batman: Arkham City was 16 GB.

Portal 2, for some reason, is 11 GB. I hope that's because of all the Co-Op maps, because the single-player certainly shouldn't justify that size...

World of Warcraft has changed radically in size over the years. Back in Burning Crusade it was around 20 GB, Wrath of the Lich King bumped it up to 30 GB, Cataclysm bumped it a little higher to around 33 GB I believe, and now Mists of Pandaria has fortunately managed to consolidate it back down to a tidy little 25 GB.

Dragon Age: Origins + Awakening + DLC is pretty massive as well. Something like 18 GB all in all?

Oh, and Bioshock Infinite was about 17 GB.

I have to cycle through what games I have installed fairly regularly, my hard drive isn't all that large. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to afford the complete overhaul I've been looking at, which would end up with me having more than double the amount of hard drive space I've got right now.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Yeah there are some really huge space eaters on my list


Glad I got that 1TB hard drive, along with the 120GB SSD.

 

[TheEmoGhost]

Star Wars: The Old Republic is about 25GB of space and a 15GB Download, not counting patches.
Battlefield 3 forced me to purchase a new HDD for my Xbox, due to the 2-3GB patches and updates every few weeks.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

Kinda sucks when you live in a country with not the best internet and data caps... So I bought a disc version of the Witcher 2, which I had to still download 10gigs of stuff, admittedly some of it was the free dlc, but still.

Single biggest game though, that Conan MMO, from what I understand, around 40-50 gigs or something, ridiculous.

Battlefield 3. For the 360, you have to download all the HD stuff to play online, which is a couple gigs.

The HD visual stuff? It's not needed to play online, it's to make the game look better. I didn't get that for a little while after I had been playing and a friend mentioned it.

 

[Xanex]

Yeah there are some really huge space eaters on my list


Glad I got that 1TB hard drive, along with the 120GB SSD.

Also got a 1TB hard drive with a additional 500GB. I never had the need to uninstall any game. Still have WoW even though I haven't played it in 2 years.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I think Saints Row 3 is 11 gig with the DLC. I've got about 60gig left to download of my steam games.

 

[saxxon.de]

Back when I played World of Warcraft a couple of years ago. After a long pause I came back with Wrath of the Lich King and installing Vanilla WoW + The Burning Crusade + WotLK took around 6 hours after which I learned that you could just install from the WotLK-DVD and were good to go. Now that I'm writing this, I remember that StarCraft 2 - Wings of Liberty also takes very long to install from disc, around half an hour or so, I believe. Somehow I think this indicates Blizzard may be a bit incompetent when it comes to install routines.

Today, especially with Steam, such problems don't exist for me anymore. I have 50 MBit/s Cable, so downloading even around 10 Gigabytes takes only around 30 Minutes. While installing 30 GB would still take quite long, it's also fast enough to get the download done while watching a movie or something.

 

[Rob Robson]

And lo, he encountered a 30gb game file size.

Pfff, Age of Conan is 5 years old and was like 38GB when it came out

But then again, it's still technically and graphically like any new game today.

You guys should just upgrade your internet connections, as now that graphics cards are tripling memory size every new generation and 3TB HDDs are dirt cheap, texture sizes are only going to incrementally increase.

I bet the first game to break 100GB will be out by end of 2017.

 

[Joccaren]

Nothing that surprised me. I expect and want games to be 20Gb+ these days, it means there's actually some decent textures in them, and hopefully a fair bit of content too.

What does surprise me is when a game that I have bought the disk for expects me to download the game, despite having the disk to install off. Steam is terrible for this and that is one of the main reasons I hate it.

 

[Yuuki]

My PC version of BF3 is currently sitting at 32GB, the largest game on my drive :S

But given the sheer number of maps and content with all the DLC's over time, big game is big!

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

How are people listing games between 11 and 18 gigs as "space eaters?" Are you guys kidding or what? I mean, yeah, they're big, but they aren't massive. In fact, that's a pretty average size for games these days.

 

[ramboondiea]

mine always tells me it will take days to download, usually everything is done in a few hours so i just stopped listening to that steam estimate.

I do remember the day that my internet provider was having problems and i got like triple the normal speed then i should have been getting, basically decided to download everything, easily downloaded 200gb worth of crap that day.


Captcha: Change the world. well who am i to ignore thia clear sign from a higher power?

 

[CCountZero]

Personally, I love what you describe as "space eaters". More often than not, it speaks well of the game in question.

Drive prices have been a little high since the whole tsunami deal in Japan kinda went and put something like half the worlds hard drive production factories under water, but it's flattening out again, returning to the insanely cheap levels it were prior to that.

So yeah. Drive space is not a problem, provided you know how a screwdriver works.

 

[CCountZero]

What does surprise me is when a game that I have bought the disk for expects me to download the game, despite having the disk to install off. Steam is terrible for this and that is one of the main reasons I hate it.

Not that I wanna be an asshat about it, but while Steam will default to downloading it after you add the Key to your account, you can just stop the download and install from the disk. Doesn't really seem fair for you to "hate" Steam, if that's a main reason.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

The X-Files Game had a size requirement of something around 8-10GB, which back in 1998 was huuuuuuge. It also took forever to install -- seven CD-ROMs and a full night of doing nothing but staring at a progress screen. Wasn't even worth it in the end.

Personally, I love what you describe as "space eaters". More often than not, it speaks well of the game in question.

Maybe that's generally true, but in the case of Max Payne 3 or RAGE, quantity does not equal quality.