Ah, yes. The “let’s bloat our game size to bully other games off your SSD so you’ll be reluctant to ever uninstall it, because reinstalling it would be a big pain, that way you’ll play it indefinitely and give us extra money in micro transactions” strategy.
I don’t think that’s really the strategy at play. It seems more like they are under the impression that it’s not their problem and gamers will do what they can to play.
I would say they just don’t care but the above line is a welcome addition.
The idea behind it is that they no longer compress anything because there’s a minor performance benefit. Add in 2k and 4k resolution textures for everything and you’ve got a massive game.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they want it to take up so much space that uninstalling and reinstalling it would be too much work, so you just play their game
Not really though. The HW accelerated compression algorithms are quite fast and use dedicated hardware that’s not doing anything if you aren’t using it for that, and it actually increases the effective I/O speeds significantly - this was a huge part of the “road to PS5” presentation by Cerney a few years back.
The problem is that it means optimizing for each target platform. Which is more expensive than not optimizing for any platform. So guess which one Activision does?
Platform specific asset optimisations are completely automated these days.
I would be curious if a large game would push people towards installing or uninstalling more. Personally I keep the 10GB indie titles on my Steam Deck and uninstall anything over 100GB.
Unless you are pirating the game and need to redownload it I wouldn’t give uninstalling it a second thought.
Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy to make people play the game, it’s that efficient code costs more, and the bloat doesn’t effect their sales enough to pay coders to make it efficient
you can’t write 200 GB of code unless you’re GPT. Those files are all needlessly high quality models and textures, environments, etc.
Yeah, but games a fraction of its size has better textures…
It’s not that
No it is. We’re talking different types of quality. There’s subjective quality, which would be appearance, art style, direction, cohesion. You can make something high quality with fairly low detail meshes and textures.
Then there’s quality in the sense of fidelity. You could decimate a mesh and reduce the amount of surfaces on it by an order of magnitude, make it much smaller, faster to render, etc. and have it almost imperceptibly different from the original mesh. Same thing with textures and audio.
Then there are other optimisations, like cutting a mesh you’ll only ever see from one side in half, so instead of rendering an entire high-rise building, you’re basically rendering a cutout.
Doing this takes precision and time though, but it’s worth it because it makes the game run much better, and the asset smaller, at no cost to the visual fidelity, assuming the player doesn’t go out of bounds and views the asset from a side it wasn’t meant to be viewed.
Modern hardware and rendering techniques have gotten so good we can basically forego this though. Deep Learning Super Sampling was initially suggested as a way for lower performance hardware to run games better, but what we’ve ended up with is developers taking shortcuts, not optimising their games, and rendering them on lower resolutions while having DLSS take care of up scaling and improving the image quality.
You can have really high fidelity textures, meshes, sound, and VFX, that takes up a tonne of space, while still looking/sounding/feeling rubbish.
Are they just leaving their textures uncompressed for the performance advantage that would offer? It’s pretty much common practice now to just compress them and have the game engine decompress them on the fly, but that does have a significant performance cost.
I could see it making a difference if they are going for “twitch” shooter. But I don’t know enough about shooters to know if that is the gameplay style cod is going for, or if that is even a term for shooters people use anymore.
They are probably using DirectStorage to increase game performance, that means that the only compression available to them is GDEFLATE. And that’s not the most efficient algorithm for photo like images as used in textures.