It’s hard and it particularly slows down the asset production process which is already a disproportionately slow and expensive part of development. Way easier to let the artists go apeshit exporting everything at 8k and a billion polygons because storage is cheap in a production environment.
Compression could help in theory, but then you’d have to decompress assets on the fly which takes a significant amount of processing power. The industry is trying to reduce the latency of getting assets into memory, compression would be moving the other way from that.
If you’re conspiratorially minded then you might also conclude that it’s to prevent people from having another major live service game installed on base model consoles, making you more likely to keep playing the one you’ve already installed. A kind of walled garden effect.
I mean I get that decompression can be expensive, but there’s nothing stopping them from having a base version of the game with smaller lower quality assets and allowing players that want to download the huge assets do so with a free dlc. Many games have done this in the past.
Nothing except the work of creating lower quality assets and splitting off the HD stuff into a separate download. Totally doable and I’d love to see it, but I doubt studios will commit the man hours unless they can be convinced that it will really make the game sell better.
Why decompress on the fly? For a lot of things the crazy high-res textures aren’t needed or appreciated while playing. I downloaded some newer FTP Quake title. It had 30 fucking GB for like a dozen maps or so. It is a god damn arena shooter. You are way to busy jumping around, making fast paced shots and so on, to ever appreciate that the texture is still detailed, when you are pressing your virtual face against ist. And it takes so much more ressources because the texture needs to be loaded in the VRAM and then scaled down anyways because you aren’t pressing your face against it.
Considering AI development, please stay tuned. So, I doubt that we will see “planet of apes” as “society 2”. Sorry, monkey. However, there is still “society 3” possible, depending on our AI overlords. So, as I said, stay tuned.
Better hardware make gamedevs more lazy, remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island) now 100+GB for a below average and unfinished game, back then if you have mid even low end PC you can still enjoy most if not all the games (1990-2009) ever released now devs just know everyone have high end PC to play their 10 minutes games before you got board and play solitaire instead
remember when they managed to squeeze a game with 3d+music into a CD? (Lego island)
Back then a CD had about as much storage as your entire hard drive. Also, lego island isn’t really a AAA game. A AAA game from 1997 would be something like final fantasy 7, which came on two whole CDs. Drive capacity hit a boom around the 2000s and 2010s, and only recently have AAA games been catching up.
People always want to blame this shit on game developers being lazy, and they’re not wrong that a lot of AAA games are bug ridden messes designed to please shareholders. But games are getting more and more complex, and these developers are being forced to work under strict time constraints.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve. Maybe offering different download options depending on your storage needs should become a common practice (iirc some games used to do that back when internet bandwidth was limited).
Yeah, it was one of the few games that actually shipped with Linux binaries. Also after like 8 months, they released a huge update with some 10 new maps, new characters and a new game mode as a free download instead of calling it a “DLC” and charging money for it. Back when games were actually made to be played instead of being a marketing platform.
Tho shit has changed since then. The quality of audio and video has increased. Especially on the visual side this takes a lot more storage. More polygons and more pixels equal larger size.
Also, if I remember correctly, data is often stored in multiple places to make it more efficient to read it from BluRay or HDDs.
Tho, with SSDs now in everything, the second thing will probably die out.
This is already the case. Even the fastest blu-ray is like 40x slower than the internal SSDs on the PS5 and the XSeX/XSeS, and the largest capacity is only 100GB which isn’t even a single Call of Duty.
“You did not help me plant the grain, and you did not help me care for it. You did not help me cut it and take it to the mill. You did not help me make the bread. I will eat it myself." And she did.
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