I donโt get why modern AAA refuses to compress / distribute lower storage requirement assets.
Itโs 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 youโd 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 youโre conspiratorially minded then you might also conclude that itโs to prevent people from having another major live service game installed on base model consoles, making you more likely to keep playing the one youโve already installed. A kind of walled garden effect.
Why decompress on the fly? For a lot of things the crazy high-res textures arenโt 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 arenโt pressing your face against it.
I FUCKING LOVE DEEP ROCK GALACTIC!
FOR SUCH A SMALL PRICE AND ONLY 5GB OF SPACE REQUIRED YOU GET INSANE AMOUNTS OF CONTENT AND FUN!
is it still worth getting into? it seems like something Iโd like but Iโve never played it before and donโt have crazy amounts of time like I used to. should I still give it a go?
Because itโs the only game your console will have with the shitass packing they do
Itโs getting 100% intentional. I find it ironic when CoD used to be known for being a fairly storage conscious game and now itโs 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.
Games which needs a NASA computer and a half Google server to play it with more than 15 FPS are not necesarly better as some 15 years old games for Win XP, they only have somewhat better graphics.
Remembering old Games, like Black Messiah or Tomb Rider from 2013, which work at >30-50 FPS with a few Gigs HD and less than 4 Gigs RAM, apart of having very good graphics.
New games often also are badly optimized, needing way more min sys specs as needed for the quality they offer.
Someone remember the game kkrieger? A short 3D FPS in a single file with only 96 KB, that is art. It can still be downloaded (abandonware, Windows)
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
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.
