Why Are Games Now Making Hard Drives More Crisis?

In each new generation of consoles, the size of the game also increases. Remember when games only took up 100-500 kb on the NES or when the first Doom only took up about 2 mb on a floppy disk? Now compare it with games now that can reach 50-80 GB. The size of today’s games is so huge that it makes two types of gamers sad, namely those with slow internet and those with little hard drive remaining.

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This raises a big question, how can the size of the game increase so drastically with one step of the console generation? The PS3 and Xbox 360 era games used to be dominated by games that had a size of less than 20 GB. And one step towards the PS4 and Xbox One generations, suddenly all games have an average size of 50-60 GB.

From what I remember, Titanfall was the pioneer of today’s generation of skyrocketing games. This game has a size of 50 GB when it was released which could make gamers gape. The game uses the Source Engine, which is the engine from Valve to make Half Life 2. How big was Half Life 2 yesterday? Around 3-4 GB when first released (now reaching 6-7 GB). So what makes this game and the games of today’s generation so great?

High resolution textures uncompressed and support up to 4K

The most obvious reason and probably the first one that pops into your head is “next-gen graphics” and it’s true. But what really makes the game size bloated is that all the textures in the game are no longer compressed and can support up to 4K resolution.

Why is this texture not compressed anymore? There are 3 reasons:

In order to reduce the risk of loss of quality in the texture. Uncompressed texture also provides the best quality and detail, but for that quality the risk is to take up a lot of space.
In order to reduce CPU work to bring images, the CPU must first decompress while you play.
Take advantage of today’s technology. With current bluray discs having higher capacities and advanced console making specifications, developers are starting to abandon the data compression process to save development time.

As proof of how much influence compression On textures, Bethesda a few months ago gave away free DLC in the form of a High Resolution Texture Pack which contains high-resolution, uncompressed Fallout 4 textures. The size of this DLC is bigger than the size of the game itself, which is 58 GB.

High quality audio files and also uncompressed

Just like textures, audio in games is no longer compressed. If we compare it with Titanfall which was a surprise in 2014, behind their 50 GB game size, around 35 GB is filled with audio files, which means the game itself is only 15 GB. Then why is this audio not compressed? The reason is the same as in textures, providing the best quality while reducing CPU work.

With technologies such as surround systems that are increasingly mainstream today, developers are trying to take advantage of these technologies to produce atmospheric and immersive audio. But of course for that quality, the audio file will be bigger than usual.

Multi language audio

With games now becoming more global, developers no longer only make English-language games, they also provide non-English audio that is dominant in Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. This collection of language audio, which you probably will only choose English, is one of the reasons why the game size is bigger.

If you are a pirated gamer who often downloads via “repack”, then you know that many repackers offer the option to download only one language audio that you really use and discard the rest. Why do developers rarely provide the same options? We never know.

Open-World trend or more open levels

With more sophisticated hardware, developers increasingly want their game levels to look bigger or even shift from linear games to Open-World. Games like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are examples of games that transition from their linear levels to open-world filled with side missions.

With the uncompressed high quality textures and the large area, it’s probably only natural that the game will eat up tens of GBs. But what about games like Doom (2017) and Wolfenstein The New Order that aren’t open world? Both games have a level design that is very broad and full of detail in it compared to open-world which usually only reuses the assets provided by the game. If all these levels are combined into one, it will be the same size as the area of open world games as mentioned above.

Solutions for developers

For console gamers, the size may not be that much of a drag because the physical version is still alive on their platform. For PC gamers, this higher size makes them more tormented to download it and the physical version is also increasingly extinct now for those who are lazy to wait for download.

The only solution to reduce some of the size of this large game is to give the option of what language the player wants to use because in the end we will only use one language and the majority are English. For PC, the option to optionally download high resolution textures like Fallout 4 and Shadow of Mordor is also a great way to see that not all PC gamers can play with ultra settings and 4K resolution.

The split between multiplayer and single player can also be a good option. For Steam gamers who have Call of Duty, you may know that in their library there are two versions of Call of Duty that they bought, namely Single Player and Multiplayer. Seeing that many players buy games for single player or multiplayer only, having two content in one application sometimes will only waste space on the hard drive.

These solutions certainly don’t completely make the game small again like the era of 2012 and below, but at least the hard drive is not completely filled with files that you won’t access at all.