Also by making the videos blurry https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BaX5YUZ5FLk
Videos and textures are usually the biggest part of games, closely followed by audio
It’s funny because you don’t even have to go that far to find examples of really poor space usage.
Final Fantasy VII has the entire game on each disc. Only the cutscenes are different between each disc, that’s why the natural breakpoint for the game after the party splits up was shifted, because the ending video was too big and required a disc by itself.
The second a developer doesn’t have to worry about something, they don’t. Give them 2TB NVMe, 5090, i9-14900k and 32GB of RAM, and suddenly that will all be at max utilization. But this isn’t a modern thing, it’s just one of many “necessity is the mother of invention” examples.
Another great example: Every modern desktop app and most mobile apps that just package & run an entire web browser for every single app. There is zero benefit to the user experience or resource utilization to use these sorts of tools, the only reason to do so is to allow code reuse & simplify development.
Welllll… everything in software development is trade-offs.
It’s honestly pretty rare that one solution is unequivocally “better” than another, across every dimension you might care about (which includes non-technical things).
The kinds of egregious defects you might think of as brazen incompetence or laziness are more often the result of everyone (technical and non-technical alike) refusing the actively pursue one side of a trade-off and hoping that the devs can just “nerd harder”.
Technical constraints as in the case of the N64 example can actually help avoid the “just nerd harder” fallacy, because they prompt serious discussions about what you can and can’t compromise on.
Ironically, when we sit here as users and complain about games not being optimized in this way or that, we’re also refusing to engage in a conversation about trade-offs and insisting that devs just “nerd harder”.
Edit: That’s not to provide any excuses for the blatant financialization of the industry which prompts the whole “don’t trade off anything, just have them nerd harder” mindset… but to warn yall that even if the market wasn’t ruled by greedy suits, we would probably still be feeling like old games managed to do more with less, cuz well… trading away 500MB of bundle size so you can get better logging of resource management in production wasn’t really an option.
Ok but like, Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 edition + DLC is going to be 1mb smaller than the Switch 1 version without the DLC
Oh yeah?
What’s the tradeoff for not making 4k textured an optional download?
Theyre chasing a pixel fidelity higher than most peoples TVs at the cost of everyone’s disk space
Higher-ups noticed gamers think “realistic” = “good” and blame developers instead of executives for the resulting problems.
some games did the opposite, when they ported to platforms with better hardware they would have improved graphics, longer intros, better sounds, maybe even extra levels. my favorite game of the time (still one of my favorites today) Prince of Persia is an example.
original apple II version:
popular dos version:
macintosh version:
SNES version:
That is a cool example! Thanks for sharing
Fun fact about that specific example btw, it is the reason we got assasins creed series.
300 gigs is fucking ludicrous, i’m genuinely shocked that anyone is delusional enough to defend that.
Game Dev here.I WISH we could still ship with N64 quality textures and audio. We’d use so much less disc space and probably finish sooner and cleaner.
FTL, Valheim, Muck, Brawlhala, Amongus, Lethal Company, Loop Hero, Papers Please, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Ion Fury … are all under 1 gig.
Selaco, Prodeus, Ultrakill, Project Warlock, Cultic, DUSK… all between about 2 and 5 gigs.
This is far from an exhaustive list.
You can ship games like these.
People have done it, and made a good chunk of change, with dev teams of between … what, a single person to a max of maybe 10? Less?
You need to wish to work at a different studio, with different management, maybe a different engine, not wish its possible to make a successful game without stupendously huge asset libraries.
Hell, even Alien Isolation, SOMA and No Man’s Sky are just above 20 gigs, MGS V is just under 30 gigs of on disk size.
It is totally possible to do pretty darn good graphics without breaking over 100 gigs of disk space.
None of these have anything even remotely close to 4k textures. We can argue all day about whether or not those are required for “good graphics” (I don’t think so either). But there’s no amount of optimization that compresses those textures without losing the fidelity you’re using them for.
It’s got absolutely nothing to do with the engine or optimization.
The majority of disc space on a game like CoD is textures, audio and FMV. There’s no compressing 4k textures to get them to a reasonable footprint without losing quality. Same for 4k FMV. It’s not management that drives the desire for high-res textures and diverse asset libraries, it’s generally the art team. Once they’re allowed to care about what kinds of shrubbery exist in Borneo and which exist in Minneapolis, you end up with 30 kinds of plants. Multiply that out for rocks, cars, rugs, etc and add in the expectation for 4k or 8k screens and individual assets get huge and the library gets huge.
You’re right that it’s possible to do “pretty good” graphics for less, but it’s telling that your examples are from a decade ago and/or heavily stylized.
I hear you, but I will say that there’s a lot of indy games out that are great but mimic the graphics (and requirements) of old. Crow Country is a good one top of mind.
Point being it’s more about what people want to make, IMO.
It’s also about what people want to buy. If games with that aesthetic reliably sold like gangbusters, AAA would follow.
*indie
You’ll have to correct him 500 times for it to stick.
There’s a simple conflict of interest here: with a game that big, you can install fewer games. You don’t want to uninstall it since it’s so big, and sometimes your friends want to play it. So you keep it installed and play it more often.
I really like efficient code, and that includes memory and storage-efficiency.
Luanti, where i run a server rn, uses less than 1 GB of storage space for a huge world, and i think the whole program code for all of mineclonia+the core luanti engine only uses sth like 30 MB. it’s really storage-efficient.
I looked up luanti. Perfect time to get into writing mods again lmao.
Yet another thing awesome on luanti. My friends aren’t convinced it’s minecraft and say it’s a rip off just buy the Microsoft one and im like , no fuck Microsoft not doin it.
Ignores the 300 gig is largely already heavily compressed saving you terabytes of space
I’d argue that this is similar to stores writing “you saved x [currency]” on the receipt. There’s a lot of unnecessary data in AAA games.
Ignores the 300 gig are made up of partially duplicates assets to improve loading times on shit drives.
That’s been a common method since CDs first showed up.
Yeah, high def assets aren’t exactly light on disk space.
Mmmmmm, shareholder profits.
I have the suspicion it’s not even about shareholder profits, it’s use dumb/useless metrics of success.
It’s the equivalent of measuring a programmer’s productive output in number of lines of code written. It leads to code like this:
Something similar happens with storage space: It is wasted unnecessarily because media designers are paid for “high definition” assets.
I was more of thinking the company prioritizing a yearly release schedule with little to no money/man power invested in optimization. Money not spent on the game is money to sate the shareholders.
I’m having an absolute blast jumping between zombies, hardcore Stakeout 24/7 and prop hunt.
I chose the path of fun ✌️😌
