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Starfield install size revealed, available to preload now
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Not everyone has large SSDs with space to spare to play multiple games, it seems like it would be pretty straight forward to have HD texture pack downloadable as DLC or something like Skyrim had back in the day, I wonder why more devs don't do that? That would give players a choice of which to use.
Requires even more work and even more budget. I understand the problem but it has always been there. There are people now who can't afford 1tb and there were people 20 years ago who couldn't afford 50gb when that was the equivalent. This won't ever go away. And it's fault by consumers who expect bigger and better things for less and less money. You can only optimize so much on your budget. I still understand this is a problem it's just not one that will get solved anytime soon, which is a shame.
It genuinely doesn't take meaningful work.
They already do all the relevant categorization for what can get loaded when with graphics settings and presets. It's basically flipping a switch.
You're right that it would take budget and time of course, but it doesn't seem like a huge amount of work for most dev studios compared to making their game more accessible to a wider audience? I feel like there's some marketing thing of "our game is so awesome it takes 1000GB of disk space!" going on, which is really stupid, but it's probably working sadly!
You're not quite right about 20 years ago, though - I was a gamer 20 years ago (yes, your comment did make me feel old) and disk space wasn't really something people complained about, at least with respect to games. Even Sims 2 with all it's 18 expansions only took up around 10GB or so, whereas most games were 5GB or less, they had to be otherwise you couldn't fit them on a DVD. Most gamers had at least 100GB+ hard drives, 200GB+ was more common. Starfield requires 130GB of disk space, and according to the Steam Hardware Survey, at least 18% of gamers don't have that much to spare, and significantly fewer aren't going to have that to spare on an SSD and will suffer the indignity of slow load times :)
I remember buying my first hard drive for 2000 sek which is arround 180 dollars. So that's actually more expensive than 1tb today. That was more than 20 years ago but I only got 20gb worth of space. A few years later and we should arrive at the 20 years-ago-mark which made me write 50. I def wouldn't say most people had 200gb hard drives 20 years ago. If they did no one could complain 20 years later if BG3 would still fit on that drive.
It really doesn't. They include both anyway, there's no reason they can't do it as a separate download. Rainbow 6 Siege did it back in 2015 with their ultra high definition textures pack which is a 30gb download for a game that's 60gb without it. Lots of players have no use for the ridiculously high-definition textures, it would definitely make sense to separate them from the main package and cut possibly several hours or even days of download time for some people.
If it's that easy I agree!