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Baldur's Gate 3 is a 122GB download and you can't preload any of it
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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What in the fuck. Can devs please start compressing this shit better? I know this is more of a me problem, but this is like half my SSD just for this game alone. Ridiculous.
Naw naw fuck that fam, this is very much a them problem. 122gb is fucking ridiculous.
I was going to install CoD: Cold War from PS+ on my PS5 since I wanted to check out the campaign but I'd never buy it. Fuckin 230 GB for that shit. I lol'd a bit and moved on to something else. So ridiculous.
Lmao 230gigs fuck that. Sitting here cursing my own life because I have 10 gigs of Sims 4 mods. For 230GB the game better come with a hologram that pops out of a USB port to suck my fucking cock.
The only games I'll bother keeping installed that are over 100gb are my ESO with all the addons on PC, and Star Wars Battlefront II on PS5, and only because my friends and I play co-op every Friday night. But it's still ludicrous. My most played game recently, Battlebit Remastered, is a whopping 3 GB lol.
Is it sad that I'm surprised when a game is under 20gb nowadays?
I think the largest game I've ever installed on any of my devices was like 120gb, and that was The Master Chief Collection so that makes bit of sense.
Just one more reason why the obsession with the latest greatest OMGWTF HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS is the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Atari Jaguar.
We can compress textures into ridiculously small sizes, I doubt it's a problem. Audio on the other hand...
In a dialogue heavy game such as this one, each voice line for each language must be shipped with the game on steam. There's no way to split the downloads between regions and languages from within developer console on steam.
I think it's one of the most popular requests devs posted in the dev forums.
Standard lossless compression (without further assumptions) is already very close to being as optimal as it can get: At some point the pure entropy of these huge datasets just is not containable anymore.
The most likely savior in this case would be procedural rendering (i.e. instead of storing textures and meshes, you store a function that deterministically generates the meshes and textures). These already are starting to become popular due to better engine support, but pose a huge challenge from a design POV (the nice e.g. blender-esque interfaces don't really translate well to this kind of process).
Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.
What they need to do is utilize steam's branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.
The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have "great on deck" be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don't need at 800p
yeah, I don't want to fill my steamdeck with 4k res assets.
I'm sure that what can be compressed is compressed in these game files. What we really need is more intelligent assets. When downloading, the platform should take your localization settings and only download the assets required for that locale. I bet this would heavily reduce the size of many of these games.
I don't think that localization would help much. Most, probably all, assets that are taking up so much storage space are not going to include language directly.
I'd be willing to bet that the game will be available in a compressed format from a repack site with no content loss. At least 30% smaller. A recent example that I just checked, Forspoken, Original Size: 103.9 GB Repack Size: from 63.6 GB
Before I had an unlimited connection for monthly bandwidth usage I would frequently download an already purchased game from the repack site and then have steam "repair" it. Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War come to mind specifically. Saved so much of my limits at the time.
Eh… you can have high quality assets or you can have small size, but you can’t have both.
Game assets are typically some of the most heavily compressed assets there are (it’s often quicker, even from SSDs, to load a compressed asset and uncompress it than otherwise). There’s an entire middleware industry grown up around minimising asset sizes while keeping quality. 122 GB to me just screams “this game is fucking massive” rather than “this game is horribly unoptimised”.