Starfield is now available to preload on Xbox Series X/S consoles and PC, meaning we now know its install size. On PC, …
  • raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org
    5·
    1 year ago

    One of the most space-intensive types of assets is audio. Many games, story-branching singleplayer rpgs especially, have tons of dialogue. Consider that Baulder’s Gate 3 has some 174 hours of cinematics available, that’s a lot of audio.

    In the past you didn’t have things like a speaking protagonist who had choice of gender and voice style, and NPCs wouldn’t necessarily speak all their lines. Nowadays people expect their characters to have audio performance in AAA titles.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      6·
      1 year ago

      That’s why I mentioned languages, too. I’m not saying that it’s bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they’re not going to be used.

      It’s possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don’t care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users’s time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative “trim the fat” branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn’t high to do.