Anon wants to play CoD

It doesn’t actually need 130gb of updates, that’s the fun part. They probably only made a couple gigabytes of changes at most, just their shitty folder/packing structure requires downloading every single ‘unit’ of the game again because they made minor changes
- What the hell? Surely someone at their professional game development studio is capable of writing a patcher? It's not black magic.
  
  But hosting and letting everyone download the whole file is cheaper for them.
  
  Well, I know this one girl who's really good at repacking shit... maybe she could teach some of their devs!
  
  It is extra work for them so they make more money by not having a team implementing a patching system that can handle distributing only the changes. They just don't care.
  
  They probably encrypt the packages so one small change changes the whole file.

Ark Survival Evolved over in the corner hoping nobody notices its 700GB+ if you download every map.
- Ark is total madness. Every map has a copy of every dinosaur. Not just the dinos for that map, but all dinos in the game. That's because you can transfer dinos, so somebody may transfer a dino to your map from a mao that you don't have the DLC for. And you still need to be able to see and interact with that dino.
  I wonder if the new Ark Ascended fixed that.
  
  I'm no game dev, but did they not consider saving the dinos once and loading them in to each map as required?
  
  The new ark fixed nothing. Except semi playable frame rates. It's great if you want to run a game at 12fps on a 4090.
  
  That's just hysterical. I'm out here learning and strictly following rules of OOP and these motherfuckers just do whatever
- Need a fucking server farm to have that one installed because no one on that development team knows what they’re doing. Isn’t there some duplicate remover a fan made that slims it down by a significant margin?
  
  I don't play ark, but if what I read in this thread is to be believed, I'm pretty sure you'd have to repackage the game which is a big copyright nono. Also you would have to redo it with pretty much every content patch. So, probably not.

I struggle to grasp how games can even fill up all of that disk space. Do they store all their textures uncompressed?
- Uncompressed textures and uncompressed audio for all languages at once (this started with the 8th gen consoles because their shitty CPUs couldn't handle real-time decompression), so a lot of space is being taken up by audio that's never used in languages you don't understand because at some point in the last 20 years the gaming industry forgot how to create checkbox installers.
  
  Titanfall started that, iirc. I wouldn't mind so much if they let you choose which languages you want installing.
  At least some of the PS5 hardware is adding compression back again, so of those games are smaller on PS5 than on PS4.
  CoD is an unoptimised piece of shit though. Their business model appears to be snuffing out the competition by filling your drive so you can't play anything else. The last Activision game I installed was the Tony Hawk remaster. I have no interest in CoD at all.
  
  8th gen? Compression worked fine on much shittier hardware. It shouldn't be hard to decompress audio in memory.
- I make VRChat avatars and I've looked at the models for COD characters and weapons before.
  The sheer amount of material slots on those things is crazy. Like a whole ass material for a tiny texture that's just like, the walkie talkie on a character. It's so unessciary and while excess materials isn't the only reason the game is unoptimized, it's very telling of how much optimizing they actually do (basically none).
  
  Like a whole ass material for a tiny texture that's just like, the walkie talkie on a character.
  What? Are they using some special non-PBR effects?
- I've played gorgeous indie games that take up less than a gig. Surely we can do better than 100+GB for a shooter.
  
  btw size of wii u/switch games is pretty impressive.
  BOTW is 10-15 gb with all dlcs and updates. (depends on console (wiiu/switch) and exact version)
  TOTK is ~18gb and is the largest official Nintendo game
  Mario Odyssey is just 5gb
  
  I recommend you to play Xonotic. It takes 1GB on disk and looks good.
- Yes and audio files as well

I want you all to realize that elden ring, one of the most detailed, intricate, and eye pleasing games we have, is 60 gb. 60. And on consoles pushes it to 45 gb.
- one of the most detailed, intricate, and eye pleasing games we have
  I would have not thought of Elden Ring with this description. Maybe I played it to early and it got cleaned up a bit?
  
  It is a very pretty game, but because of art direction, not high quality textures, which is what a lot of the space comes down to
  
  I thought it was my trashy OLED TV but everything is so grainy looking I couldn't play for more than a few hours.

I feel blessed I don't like FPS games in general so COD was never my thing.

That's more than half the capacity of the base edition of the new consoles.
Microsoft and Sony need to step in and establish a maximum file size for games. There's no excuse for a remake of a hallway shooter from 12 years ago to be that large.

Tripple A devs making their games not take up your entire hard drive challenge (100% impossible)
- IIRC, part of the problem with some of the other CoD games was using lots of uncompressed audio and textures. It improves performance, but eats stupid amounts of space. Modern console hardware means that there's little reason not to compress stuff now, though. Decompressing audio on the fly has been incredibly easy for a long time, and dedicated hardware on current consoles just to decompress textures means that their impact on performance is also negligible.
  
  Not to mention the fact that even with uncompressed textures, some games (at least on PC, I don't own a console) still run like shit because they have not been optimized properly.

The real conspiracy is that a big game requires you to delete or limit the number of competitors games. Not only is yhere no incentive to be smaller, there is actually a strategic incentive to be bigger.

Kind of odd that anon wants to play a 130 GB fishing game, must have some really detailed fish...
- They are fully anatomically correct fish with every single cell rendered individually for maximum realism.

"Asshole design"

call of doody just aint worth, there's a billion games just as good

At this point COD should sell a custom physical SSD Drive with their game installed, like game DVD in consoles
- Full circle back to cartridges

Until gamers get sick of it and sales dip it is never going to chaaaaaange 🙃

"Data Compression? What is that, a scifi movie?" - Western Devs

Been playing CoD since CoD1, and MW2 was the last one I bought. I'm done with the franchise only because of the bullshit they've been pulling on their customers. Was getting constant 3:1 and 4:1 K/D in most matches I played, and I'm done. I wish the publishers pulled their heads out their arses, though I have no faith that they will at this point.
- No offense, but what’s your KDR got to do with anything? Being a longtime customer of the franchise and dropping it is enough.
  
  I don't know. I've got a ginormous monster cock and I've stopped playing COD as well.
  
  Idk, but it's such a COD player thing to do.
  He's probably camping in the back getting kills but not helping his team play the objective. As is tradition.
  
  It's an indicator of time spent on the game, and dedication. When I started, like most people I'd be happy to get 1:1, to consistently get 3:1 or 4:1 alongside SBMM gives a good indication to both dedication and time spent on it.
  If you want to take it as an expression of ego go ahead, though that clearly was not my intention.
- I kinda hope things change with the msft acquisition. But that's probably naive of me.
- What game are you switching to?
  
  I've been playing CS2 with a few buddies I grew up with. Most of them haven't really been into FPS games much, however for some reason they were willing to give CS2 a shot (which I'm rather happy with).
  We're thinking of switching up games around Christmas, as we have a tradition of someone gifting others something we could all play that started a few years ago. In recent times I've been focusing more on gaming to be social, rather than an escape (it took me years to get used to reminding myself to blink, when playing FPS games, and I got that sting when I did blink - I know a lot of gamers know what I'm talking about). Since my departure from sinking so many hours into CoD, I've placed even more focus on just having fun with friends I know and can talk to and my mental health has been better as a result.
  The XBox Game Pass (PC) helps a lot. There's a few titles I've gotten into on there since broadening the genres I focus on, most recently Shadow of the Tomb Raider though I also play Forza Horizon 5 (also played through FH:4). 10 years ago I would have never imagined myself to enjoy car games, though it's been great. Oh, I also play Diablo 4 (with the last one I played being Diablo 2 for less than an hour when I was in school), really cool art and the story is dark yet gripping.
- Last one I bought was black ops 2 but wasn't motivated enough to actually play it so I stopped buying them
  
  Last one I bought was WWII, I was only still buying the ones with the zombie mode in them and for that one the people I played with only played for a bit when I was working. So I played it maybe once.

I legitimately got angry when my friend bought me a CoD a few years back (no clue what one, I feel like there's been 10 in the last 3 years). I hated it so much. The abilities, the kill streaks, etc. all made it feel miserable.

Would it affect anything if a total size + recent updates' sizes were shown on the store page in bold? Shitty internet is still a thing, and getting a bigger drive isn't as problematic as just not wanting this behemoth to hoard free space you could use elsewhere.

Anon should buy a USB stick/drive.
- Anon is correct that this is fucking bullshit and that you shouldn't need external storage just to play one (1) game that's not even that good.
  
  Most games run like ass on external storage anyway.
- sata*

I can definitely recommend it tho! And it's more expensive than an SSD than can hold it and 40 other games
edit: (to clarify) ssd's are cheap af. If you can buy a game for 80 euros, you can buy an SSD for 15 (or more)
- That's not how you sell it to people. You're making it sound overpriced.
  
  What I love is that this guy argued for a week that he wasn't selling anything. Like your quip personally offended him so badly he lost command of the English language.
  
  I'm not selling anything
- Problem comes when Anon has a laptop and doesn't want external drives
  
  ssd's go inside a laptop too
  
  That’s when you learn that
  a) you can upgrade laptops with a larger SSD and
  b) that it’s a bad idea to buy one that has the SSD soldered on…