It’s getting 100% intentional. I find it ironic when CoD used to be known for being a fairly storage conscious game and now it’s this monstrosity we see before us. Glorified $70 DLC that takes up MORE space than the game it was made for
Why delete unused code and assets or optimize anything when your player base built their personality around your game? They will buy a 3rd SSD at the same time they buy the same game for the 4th time.
Of course, everyone knows you start development of a new game from the code base of the previous, but you aren’t allowed to change or delete any of the old code, you need to copy paste the functions and append a version number. It’s called version control.
I know storage is cheap, but nearly half a terabyte? I’m already giving any game the side eye if it takes more than 50G of space on a disk, let alone nearly 10x that.
You can choose to compress files on storage. If on linux. Or use tools like ConpactGUI to compress in windows 10/11.(not recommended to compress live service titles)
Part of the reason for the bulk of course is prerendered video and voice assets, especially if it has multiple voice options. Also non standardization of os level compression means you cannot send those conpressed files for users as not all users could use them if compressed using the methods mentioned above.
Downloaded dmz for some friends on pc it’s 68 so consoles probably see 75-80 if not more
This is BEFORE the fact that On console, each game demands its own space to unpack the entire thing when it tries to update. So on PS5 not only is the game 150gb, but you need 150 free space to update meaning the game is functionally a “ghost” 300gb (I uninstalled cold war over this shit, I don’t have time or room on a console for that fucking nonsense)
You’d think, thanks to removing HDDs, we’d no longer need file duplicates (because physics) and games get smaller again. But then you get unoptimized 4k textures and huge language packs for the 10000 hours of cutscenes, which you all have to always download. sigh
My guy, if you talk about slow ass HDDs then yes, but games have become so large that you have to have a SSD at least to have enough read speed for reasonable loading time for shaders, textures, etc.
Anything >2TB becomes very expensive very quick
Add PCIe 4/5, M.2 form factor, non-2280 length (like SteamDeck) and extra features (if you need them) and they quickly begin zo add up to a point where it’s not feasible to buy it beyond having enough budget to not worry about that fact.
And afaik you’d need PCIe 4.0 M.2 storage to being able to use DirectStorage
I was only talking about normal m.2 ssds for pc, console is something different. There aren’t many extra features you meed for gaming. Storage is very cheap right now in comparison to what it used to be but it still isn’t cheap enough for game studios to pull this shit
SSDs sure became cheap and I agree that the game devs are pulling some heavy bs with that stuff. My rig is all flash based (+ an HDD that is for nvidia shadow play so it doesnt write my flash to death for nothing useful. I won’t count that).
But shopping for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 4TB 2280 is very expensive when you compare it to a 4TB HDD or even good desktop 8TB 7200 RPM CMR drive.
Usually my backlog is used enough for me to justify not spending the money on >2TB (anything equal or below 2TB is dirt cheap) TLC drives.
Small addition:
4 TB Crucial P3+: 216€
Sabrent Rocket 4TB Q4 M.2: 280€ Samsung SATA 8TB 870 Evo (QLC): 344€
8TB 7200RPM SATA drives (Geizhals link to how I searched): Anything between 145-250€
(Heavily depending on others factors like cache but still cheaper if you have the patience to wait).
8TB 2280 M.2 SSDs: Starting at 780€.
Yes the costs are coming down and 5 years ago you would probably be ballin to even think about 8TB in flash as a consumer. In another 5 years SSDs may become so cheap per TB that only € per TB would make a HDD feasible until you start to put SSDs in a 3.5" enclosure and arent constrained by the 2.5" form factor. The cost quickly gets out of hand at some point for a consumer just for having to wait 20 seconds to one minute.
Hope I made my stance clear: It’s cheap. Until it isn’t (for a consumer)
Indeed but the drop in prices for what I considered the normal sizes gives me a little bit of hope for the bigger drives, I would really love a 4/8tb drive so I don’t have to worry about storage again but that will have to wait some time
Data points in the range of Gigabytes (uncompressed), the rest is unoptimized textures and models, duplications and other bullshit. Bet you could get 10 or so fps more, if they invested a few days for optimzations.
IIRC ark stores each model. If the island has 1000 trees, it stores the model of each of them, instead of having 1 model and copy-pasting it. Neither CoD not ark care a single bit for their storage needs.
On console: Mw2 150gb warzone2 115gb Mw2s “cod hq” for launching games 50gb (the only mandatory one) Mw3 seems to be about 190 looking at articles. (For campaign, zombies and warzone)
They’re starting to obfuscate where each thing comes from now with the Cod HQ Launcher to play off the size of the games. As well as let you delete components like zombies and campaign to “save space” that they hoarded.
Developers follow industry leaders. If call of duty can sell a 240gb game (mw3 on ps5 without their launcher) other publishers look and will decide to get lazy optimizing. “We’re not call of duty, our game is ONLY 70gb!” You already see this.
It’s not a nerve, in the March of progress there’s always someone at the front of the line youre not wrong., But these aren’t just in front, they’re racing the March like they want to set a new quarter mile record. Mw3 is 240gb (if you dont already have the launcher hub)
For most people who buy a console and forget about it, that’s ONE game with half the hard drive space already eaten, with 8 years left in the ps5s life, not counting support during “next gen”. It’s a lack of respect for consumers time updating it, because cod has to unpack its entire friggin size to update. Cold War demanded 180gb of “free space” to update. The game was ~160 before, and then ~165 after. It took 180gb to download 5gb. Thats half my hard drive.
Consumers will happily buy a hard drive “when it’s about that time” but consumers are not flush with cash to buy 5 externals for games each year, at the rate game sizes have gone. People also do not want to juggle what games are installed because thats a PITA too. At this stage cod should just come on an external hard drive, cartridge style.
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.
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.
ZFS will do block level deduplication but requires a large table be stored in ram. The issue arises that the cost to increase your ram to keep up with that table size usually ends up being a lot more than just adding more storage.
I do believe most games have an inflated size due to uncompressed assets being included which a file system level compression could help with so long as you have the CPU to spare.
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