The size of games...

[Technocrat]

On Steam a moment ago, I saw the latest iteration of 2D Worms they've got on the go. I'm tempted of course, but that's not the point. The point is its size - apparently, it takes up about 2GB when installed. 2 gigabytes! Personally, I think that's rather obscene, for a game that doesn't look particularly far-advanced from Worms: Armageddon! How can it possibly take more space than Worms 3D and Worms Forts did?

At the risk of sounding elderly, I remember the days when the whole of Worms fit on two floppy disks, X-Wing came on three, and the size of most games could be measured in less than 10 megabytes. What on earth do they pad these games with to make them so huge these days?

/fogey

[InCreator]

Videos maybe?

[SpacePirateCaine]

Complicated or high-poly 3D models, high-resolution textures, low-compression audio (Audio is ridiculous at times, honestly) and a ton of other factors go into working out the size of a game. Even if at first glance it doesn't look that much greater than previous games in the same series, it's more than likely that they've upped the poly count and textures, added better sound, visual effects and a fair number of other little tweaks that contribute to the continued filling of your hard drive.

Hell, I bought a Terabyte drive with my new computer this year, and didn't think I could get even half way, until I decided to load my Steam/GoG library onto it. That said, I remember the good ol' days when I had Quest for Glory II on five "Five and a quarter" floppies. And when Police Quest 3 took up, like, 8 megabytes on our sixty MB drive.

Ah, the good ol' days. I guess the moral of the story is that the more space you've got, the more ways developers like us can find to fill 'em.

[Technocrat]

We still have our oldest computer at home, it's a Pentium with 2 GB of space, from before the days of 3DFX. I remember when I tried to install Deus Ex on it for a joke - it ran like a slideshow!

[Wyz]

To be honest it bothers me too, a lot of game developers these days don't spent enough time compressing their resources. Surely we want everything to look and sound crisp but using tga and flac is a bit too much if you ask me. Just png, or a slight lossy format and ogg will do a great job. I see that a lot of developers use video compression that is not really of this era, I don't know if this has anything to do with licensing or loading times, but often I get the impression it can be a lot smaller without much quality loss. But who cares about file sizes right? You can just buy a 500 gig disk for a few... I care! oh well

[Calin Leafshade]

Remember that games have to cater for *far* higher resolutions now.

Worms 2 was a standard 640x480, modern games are 1920x1080. There is a substantial difference in the file sizes.

[Hudders]

We still have our oldest computer at home, it's a Pentium with 2 GB of space, from before the days of 3DFX. I remember when I tried to install Deus Ex on it for a joke - it ran like a slideshow!

Mine's a 486 with 400MB...

Needless to say it's not much use to anyone.

[SpacePirateCaine]

What Calin said - If your textures are small and models are low-poly, the graphics-obsessed 13-17 demographic will bite your head off these days. And a big benefit of uncompressed resources is that you can actually access them at a much higher speed since you don't need to make your game actively decompressing resources and wasting tons of memory.

[Wyz]

That can be accounted for using a cache, some games have this and it's really nice. Than the user can either turn it off completely to save disk space or set it to the maximum if the user wants fast loading times. I think that's overall a better method.

[Hudders]

A lot of its just laziness. We don't need to have nice, elegant code and neatly compressed resources because the end user's bound to have the capacity to cope with the unoptimised version.

It's the same as how there's a lot more buggy software released now than there was before patching was so easy to implement, (thanks to the Internet).

[Igor Hardy]

What Calin said - If your textures are small and models are low-poly, the graphics-obsessed 13-17 demographic will bite your head off these days.

Ha, I'd like to witness it happen sometime.

[SpacePirateCaine]

You want to see a 15-year-old bite my head off?
Live, no less?

[Hudders]

You want to see a 15-year-old bite my head off?
Live, no less?

Only if it's in HD!

[InCreator]

Honestly, new Worms has even less content and fun factor than 3MB version back in 1995 did.
Maybe the size comes from shitty multiplayer game browser and "improved", non-cute worms graphics.

[ThreeOhFour]

You want to see a 15-year-old bite my head off?
Live, no less?

Are 15 year olds even allowed to play the games you work on? 

[SpacePirateCaine]

Are 15 year olds even allowed to play the games you work on?  

Akiba's Trip is only CERO C, so technically 15+ is okay - it just looks worse on paper than it actually is*. Class of Heroes and Wizardry: Harmless. Not so sure about Gladiator Begins, though. Kuma Story? I guess if you overthink the chicken bit, it could be pretty bad.

And back on topic, I remember when games didn't even require Hard Disks at all. First computer was a good ol' TI 99/4A. Loved that thing.

*Wouldn't recommend playing the mini-games on the AKIBA'S TRIP website around your parents, though.

[ThreeOhFour]

Aw man and here I thought you were working on totally sexy games

As for game sizes, I was a dialup user well into the broadband era, and recall anything over ~2mb being far too much for my internet to handle on most days (2kb/s and frequent cutouts).

I also remember starting a 30mb download for the second Apprentice game and having to not use the PC for the rest of the day in case it froze or something while it downloaded the game  

[Hudders]

I also remember starting a 30mb download for the second Apprentice game and having to not use the PC for the rest of the day

My Internet used to time-out after two hours.

[Radiant]

What bothers me is when retro games require ridiculous amounts of disk space and/or run slowly on low-end processors. A game that runs in something like 320x200 has no business having 100 Mb of graphics, nor requiring a 2 GHz machine to run properly. That's just sloppy coding.

[Calin Leafshade]

A game that runs in something like 320x200 has no business having 100 Mb of graphics, nor requiring a 2 GHz machine to run properly. That's just sloppy coding.

*raises hand.

Yes that would be me.