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I recently bought the 2021 remaster of a strategy game from 2004 and it was almost 50 GB. Add another 12 GB if for some reason you want the 4k textures on models from 2004. This game used to come on a CD.
4k and 8k textures are huge. Upscaling the textures takes a lot of extra space surprisingly. That's usually the single biggest thing bloating a games size.
The crazy thing is that a lot of today’s models are actually much more simple than they used to be. Look at comparisons for old games like Mario Galaxy versus Mario Odyssey for good examples. But this is done because it allows for more detailed environments; The lack of polygons means that (as long as the textures can be loaded fast enough) your rendering goes much faster. You’re not being bottlenecked by polygon counts anymore, because there are fewer polygons.
But this has caused texture sizes to balloon, because now you’re shifting nearly all the heavy lifting over to those textures instead of the polygons.
For more graphically intensive games actually, this is shifting back bc polys are a lot cheaper than texel density these days. Games like Star Citizen, Alien Isolation, Cyberpunk and Starfield (or other hardsurface elements in games like firearms or vehicles) with insanely intricate hardsurface elements that the player needs to be able to be up close all around and inside can't use baked normals due to the fact it'd just be impossible to get a decent texel density and bake, so now games are shifting to something called 'face weighted normals' which basically means that all the big bevels and chamfers are actually part of the model's geo instead of being baked down. Smaller stuff like greebling will be a flat plane shrink wrapped to the curvature of a surface with baked detail as a displacement or normal map.
Thanks for the link, that's actually really dope.
I love seeing optimization tricks like this.
To be clear, the 4k textures are an optional free extra download that bumps the install size up significantly above the ~50GB. The 1024x1024 textures that come with it as standard will still have taken up a good chunk extra over 2004's version though, of course
I've dug around in the files a little bit for modding purposes and as far as I can tell, one of the biggest reasons for bloat is the way that they implemented an ethnicity system in the remaster. In the original, units just had a skin colour that was roughly appropriate for the historical home region of the faction they're from. In the remaster, they added a system that gives the units some variety in appearance that takes in to account where the unit was recruited; if you recruit soldiers in England, they'll be paler on average than the ones recruited in Algeria. However, it seems like the way this was implemented was to give every single unit a unique texture for every ethnicity. There's no common set of, say, five-ten faces for southern European men, for example. Every single unit has one southern European face, one northern European face, one north African face etc etc. Same goes for the visible skin on the rest of the body. Multiply that across about a thousand different units and suddenly you've got an utterly absurd number of nearly identical textures. And since this a strategy game, players are basically never looking at any of them at a level of zoom that affords each unit more than a few dozen pixels.
The secret? SSDs.
There's no need to be smart or clever about compression or implementation, since all files can be called immediately from the hard drive.
No need to create iterative processes now since you can just brute force the entire production. It is technologically superior, it creates superior performance, yet has the drawback of huge file sizes.
Speed is not the appropriate answer to bloat.
There's still very much a need to have a brain when it comes to storing data, it'll take far longer to upload, download, load up the game and load scenes and not everyone has an SSD, heck even if they do everyone can benefit from smaller games. Also if you do it properly it will have significantly better performance as less is being loaded from the disk, memory and vram.
Or uncompressed audio in multiple languages/different soundtrack variants (original/remaster)
I think people also have an odd idea of what it takes to photorealistically depict a fucking stadium full of people and players with realtime reflections and sweating normal maps. The texture info alone is gonna be huge, but likewise there are tons of high res models animating in realtime all over the screen. So yeah, this being a gigantic install makes sense if 4k res gaming is what people want to play.
Audio is also huge for most games. Especially if the game has a lot of dialogue and offers several languages. AAA, dialogue heavy games can have hundreds of hours of audio for a single language.
They should really be setting that up in a way that users select their language and only download the files related to the selected language. I don't even need the other official language for my country, let alone dozens of other languages I don't speak.
Yeah, I feel like the improvements in gaming hardware have gone 50% to improving dynamic systems and graphics, and 50% to messy project bloat. Not to mention the constant crunch culture means they never have time to clean things up before launch, and after launch is for game breaking bugs and DLC.
