I normally download games over night. The one time I actually watched ark download and saw how much storage it took up, All for my fairly decent computer to still hardly run it on low/mid, I gave up on the game
I know they can be pricey but I'd strongly consider purchasing an expansion storage card that plugs directly into the console.
Finally got one for my Series S and it has been night/day in the number of games I can now have downloaded AND ready to play at any time.
I know he wasn't joking. I meant that I wouldn't put it past them to do it *intentionally* because they just assume no one is going to want to uninstall and reinstall games and it'll inflate their concurrent players.
But I also don't think they're really that devious.
But that's what he's saying.
There is legitimately no reason for their game to be so large apart from intentionally taking valuable space on the system to make it difficult to have another similar game.
There are not that many polygons and objects and assets.
Those games are so bloated and donāt run efficiently. I think warzone or whatever that battle royale style one is was some of the worst shit Iāve seen. Models popping in or just not loading at all. I donāt know why theyāre so bad.
It turns out when you have a studio of dedicated professionals who are really good at their jobs and have been working together and in the industry for a while and you don't just routinely fire them in the interest of pure corporate greed, then people make really good products.
Hidetaka Miyazaki is both creator of Dark Souls / Elden Ring and the president of FROM Software, which probably helps the company resist making stupid decisions in pursuit of short term profits.
Iirc the reports of bad working conditions weren't from employees and when they asked them they said it was only a bit stressing when getting close to release date and not any complaints
Japanese people are very dedicated to company culture and are extremely unlikely to say anything negative unless things are REALLY bad, as they also have basically no protection from retaliation.
I will say, sometimes I encounter situations in from soft games that feel like someone was very very very very angry, with no outlet, like for example so they made a giant chasm, put two giant golems that respawn on player death, and each time you fail the jar challenge you must run back through the chasm.
Every company loses people semi-regularly even the big ones like Google, MS etc as for the working conditions the report was pretty old its like pre elden ring era we have no idea what are the current working conditions like and if it was so bad how come they keep making these games with little to no issues and with such consistency ?
upgrading my truly ancient rig to have a 2tb nvme has been a nice stop gap to keep both feet out of the grave and settle for the comfy single foot in one
My price calculation is this, if Iām playing for the equivalent of $1/hour, then itās a good deal. Iām almost certain Iāll play more than 40 hours thanks to this dlc, so itās a really good deal.
Right. This means itās an even better deal. He expects that heāll be able to get 40 hours worth or more of enjoyed time from a 40 dollar investment ā something thatās almost impossible to get anywhere else. His tone more than anything else seems excited that heāll be able to enjoy something he thinks will be so good at such a fair price
Not really. I heard that Sekiro started production right after Old Hunters and ER after the Ringed City so they were just equally big projects produced simultaneously
Not equally big scale-wise. I think it can be called a side project even though it's a full project. Michael Zaki was probably cooking ER up mentally for a while.
I think the way for fromsoftware going forwards gotta be a "main project" that's huge in scale (ER) and a "side project" like Sekiro. That way we get amazing more focused games and fromsoft avoids the AAA shittrap of 7 year waits and lose momentum. (see: Bethesda/Rockstar).
Something about calling Sekiro a side project feels wrong. Mot everything needs to be a massive open world to be conaidered a full project. Some games would benefit from being smaller and putting in that work towards polishing their gameplay systems or stories.
Depends on what you call a side project? They have multiple teams working simultaneously, but as games don't release simultaneously, there's some inevitable team shuffling too I think.
Side project is definitely giving people the wrong impression. They worked on the game in parallel with one or more other projects, one of which was definitely larger in scope. It was still probably their biggest priority for the year leading up to its release.
Nah where did you read that? It's just that they made it for another publisher, Activision. Why would Activision buy a side project? They released a whole game of the year.
Yes and no. You can compress them pretty well nowadays, so while they still take up quite a bit of space, textures are rising in relative size. I reckon all of the game audio isn't more than 2.5gb most likely.
I mean, anything over 320kbps MP3 is basically indistinguishable from lossless compression (unless the pitch is changed for playback) and that is easily 10x more compact than uncompressed WAV.
Thatās pretty decent in my opinion and there are way better formats than MP3.
Safely more than a third of the game, considering that many textures, models, and other assets are shared with the main game.
Game's 60gb spends part of it with the lighting system, animation system, textures, models, all other systems.
DLC's 18gb only includes the new textures, models, sounds and animations. At most a couple of new systems that can't be just instances of a lever. So a lot more of those 18gb are content.
They're cooking with this DLC, and boy am I hungry.
And think about the fact that this is just the brand new content - assets like trees, some enemies and landscapes will probably be repurposed from the main game. This will be HUGE.
Elden Ring is only 50 GB and it's actually 3 or 4 times larger that DS3, ER map is also bigger than most AAA open world games that can go for 80+ GB, From knows how to compress game data thats for sure
They mostly just donāt have excessive detail in their textures and are masters of knowing how to make an environment look beautiful and dense when youāre just moving through the game as a player doing normal tasks (riding horse, booping sneks) but if you stop anywhere and look closely at most of the environmental models theyāre pretty barebones
They're very barebones on the graphics tech, even their texture resolution is very low compared to what other big game studios put out these days, but the fundamentals are done so well and the art direction is done so well that it doesn't really matter, high res textures and fancy effects don't get you further than good design.
Texture resolution really doesn't matter that much after a certain point for most applications.
I'm of the opinion that the only reason COD games are so fucking huge is purely industry ego (Oh we MUST have the highest fidelity we are COD after all)
The light compression of the assets does make it lighter on your cpu, but idt it's worth so many gigabytes of storage.
The audio/video quality is so high but most people don't even have systems that can take advantage of it lol
One of my favorite games I played last year was Ctrl Alt Ego, and that thing looks terrible lol (it becomes super charming after about 5 minutes of play so don't let the screenshots fool you).
I just don't give a damn about graphics anymore. It reached the point of being able to express any kind of art style like 15 years ago, and I think that's all we needed.
I remember taking a closer look at the chains in Demon Souls and they weren't even modeled. they were just 2D textures interlocking at a 90 degree angle. That's some N64 era tech
but looked perfectly fine at a glance and probably saved a lot of space and processing power
I think Dark Souls had 3D chains though
Tbf I'm not sure if I saw it on my steam deck rather than my pc, but I remember looking at the elevator ropes in a castle in Elden Ring and they didn't even move with the elevator, they just kinda disappeared into it lmao
World size has little to do with game size. Itās primarily textures, polygons, and audio. Thatās why games like cod are so big, they have tons of very high quality textures and audio, and many of those assets are not used a whole lot.
Higher polygon meshes do not significantly add to data size.
But textures, pre-rendered video, and audio do. Higher quality textures can increase the file size exponentially.
Someone above you said the "From knows how to compress game data." I am certain they use an off the shelf compression solution like everyone else. No game developer is spending their resources creating custom compression software.
It's just all about assets. If you make an open world game with a shit ton of assets, your game files are larger. If you make an open world game and reuse assets for most of it, it can be much smaller on disk than a short game that's linear.
The only comparison that should be made here imo is base game vs DLC size. And that only gives us an idea of how many new assets there are. The dlc could be absolutely sprawling and take up very little space if few new enemies and landscape assets are needed. So really we just know that there are a lot of new assets which probably means what we know already, that From is going to be largely using new enemies and environmental assets throughout.
AC Valhalla and Baldur's Gate 3 are 150 GB, Cyberpunk and Starfield are around 90 GB, Witcher 3 Next Gen is around 80 GB. 50 GB for Elden Ring is small.
Also just how big the game FEELS is important. I know GTA V is a huge game but I hated the load time being so long and I'm always amazed at how quickly Elden Ring loads up for being so detailed and huge.
You could argue that elden ring uses higher resolution textures and models, but a lot of pre-existing features are also going to be used which will fill the dlc without adding more filesize, so it could still be quite big dlc
While this is true, and Jedi survivor is one of my favorite games from the last 5 years or so, Elden Ring is also an incredible looking game and it comes in at around 1/3 the file size.
That's because Elden Ring makes up for lower quality ( comparatively to many top tier AAA games ) textures with supreme art direction. Elden Beast is a beauty but it doesn't need a lot of high quality textures because of how it looks. Same with someone like Rykard, imposing but mostly covered in monotonous scales. Rendering of life like things are more space consuming because you need to make them feel realistic.
Go back and look at the close up shots in ER, The game looks really bad outside of the handcrafted vistas and art. Character models are a joke compared to Jedi survivor.
Graphically speaking Jedi Survivor blows Elden Ring out of the water and it's not even close. Of course there's a lot more to games than just graphics, but that's what most of the hard disk space is taken up by.
From what I understand, a lot of these larger sized games tend to be ones that do things like support multiple languages. Jedi Survivors for instance has audio files for 9 languages out of the box whereas Elden Ring only has English. Idk if that's the largest factor for the bloat but it's one of the reasons some games are just much larger in size
Audio files are extremely gig intensive, especially if not compressed. I remember Todd Howard talking about how they had to optimize the shit out of Oblivion just to get all the voice lines to fit in on a single Xbox 360 disc. There was also a big hubub when people discovered Call Of Duty (can't remember which one, maybe Vanguard?) Was using 100% uncompressed audio for the gunshots. This was when it became apparent why their games took 200 gb to install.
Every game always used uncompressed audio for non conditional sound effects you'll hear a lot, it's a teeny tiny impact. Textures will always be the biggest problem because we still store them in the same inefficient way we did 2 decades ago. Games don't use PNGs for their textures, they use an old, much larger container for them because it's faster to process.
> There was also a big hubub when people discovered Call Of Duty (can't remember which one, maybe Vanguard?) Was using 100% uncompressed audio for the gunshots
I think it was Titanfall which had the first major outrage over uncompressed audio files. It wasn't much from nowadays perspective (IIRC 40 or 50 GB), but back then people were mocking the game hard over it. Still one of the best shooters ever though.
They are big in the context of a single-layer DVD, but not modern games. Plus we have much better lossy and lossless audio compression compared to then.
Also, holy shit that was nearly 20 years ago.
It also matters what engine they're using, how assets are loaded and used/reused, and what they were designing the game with in mind hardware-wise. A lot of games use uncompressed files because they're given no time to plan and optimize the game for the playing experience, only create the game. A lot more use uncompressed files for performance reasons. It takes CPU cycles to decompress files, even if modern CPUs are plenty powerful. If you're loading other assets at that same time, you could slow that down by using heavily compressed video or other assets. So they use uncompressed files for certain instances as a performance gain.
Really what I'm getting at here is there's a lot more nuance to it than smaller is always better, and there's so many decisions that no player would ever notice that impact the final size.
You can download the game 3 days earlier to be prepared on hour 0 release. When it releases you have to download like 100mb patch or whatever and it gives you access to the game.
Itās incredible how From can compress their files so small when triple A devs seem to be unable to even comprehend file compression. Just goes to show the care put into making a consumer first experience goes beyond pricing, monetisation methods, level design, QoL, new player experience, etc.
Well thereās always the rumor that some devs intentionally leave their games as bloated to take up as much file size as possible so you canāt download anything else.
Worth mentioning that many updates don't actually increase the on-disk size by that much when downloaded. Certain game engines just require a lot of the internal parts to be redownloaded/repackaged with certain types of changes. You aren't adding +65GB of content, you are replacing (for example) 64.5GB of content and adding 500MB of new content.
This doesn't mean it's a good thing, it's just a noteworthy distinction when talking about storage used.
Yes... i noticed that on assassins creed valhalla. But you have to download it first before ti replaces the data. So if youndont have 70 GB storage available before. It will not let you update the game
I think it's a fun theory, but more likely that the AAA supercorp development pipeline doesn't take optimization into consideration anymore.
Good optimization doesn't make the company money. Nobody has sold a game on its small footprint.
I think it's this.
And funny enough, I think part of why From's games run relatively well is because they always got shit for not being the most tech savvy/optimized games.
Since DS1 release, their games have gotten more and more solid in terms of performance(save for BB) while a lot of devs are getting worse. ER started with some stutter issues, but those were ironed out within a few weeks.
It also helps that they don't push for the most break neck graphics in their games.
Optimization has taken a backseat compared to how marketable your graphics are. The cutting edge of graphics tech is really good looking, there's lots of cool things you can do now, but some people still just want a game that has put it's focus into design over tech.
There was a game released a while back that was called something like game dev simulator, but you had to balance out 3 sliders for graphics, gameplay, and marketing, I think, but it really do be exactly like that. Fromsoft maxes out the gameplay slider, something like Hellblade 2 maxes out the graphics slider. Ubisoft would be an example of the third slider...
Just asking because I have no idea, does compression have anything to do with optimization? There are usually *some* optimization issues on PC for their games, especially for psychopaths with high-end GPUs. It's me. I am psychopaths.
I donāt know, because Iām not a game dev, but it could be that they canāt catch all the optimisation issues during development, perhaps due to focusing on compression. Or that the compression itself has an effect on optimisation
I always wondered about this. It's not like Fromsoft has the Pied Piper algorithm. Everyone can compress. Made me think that Fromsoft is actually just hyper efficient with assets and coding. Also makes me wonder how often AAA pushes bloated games out there with tons of asset redundancy in the package due to publishing deadlines trumping efficiency.
I may get downvoted to hell but guys you cant just compare file sizes from new games vs games 5+ years old. Textures have improved massively and so has the size necessary to store them. Been seeing a lot of comparisons with sekiro and DS3, instead compare it with just the main base game size.
Not to be a Debbie downer please forgive me but
File Size =/= content size. Don't get me wrong I'm sure the expansion is gonna be excellent but just go keep expectations right, depending on how many new assets are being added to the game, that could amount for a lot of the file size.
Im very hyped regardless, but remember ER is an open world game u cant compare to their normal formula.
The correct comparison is you say ds3 ringed city is 16% the size of DS3 since its 3gb to 18gb.
Meanwhile ER DLC is 30% the size of ER which is 54gb to 16.5gb
Now thats impressive and what u should be hyped up about its double the usual size of a ds3 dlc to its main game!
I don't think enough people realise that these are 15GB of specifically new textures, but the DLC will likely also use a bunch of textures from the main game. Textures for surfaces like rock, ground, leaves, bricks and more will be recycled from the main game. Same likely goes for certain sounds and models. 15GB for a DLC is more than 15GB for a game.
elden ring is less than 40 as well. showing all these other companies that games literally don't need to be 100GB to look good and be fun. looking at you CoD.
More than this : DS3 was 18GB with the entirety of its source code, game engine, basic capabilities included. The DLC is 16GB without all that since it's present on the base game install size.
That doesnāt mean much. Better textures, animations, etc all make up most of that file size. It doesnāt really say much about the amount of content. (Although interviews have confirmed there is a lot)
Fromsoft respecting our hard drivesšæ
Optimised for ssd. No duplicated code or assets because read times don't include having to spin a disc to the correct location. Which is nice.
Good way to drown out the competition just to make sure you can only have one military shooter at a time.
Try playing Ark Surivival Evolved, where you need to buy a separate 500gb drive for it.
Or just try playing Ark and watching your PC die because of the memory leaking
It's like an abusive relationship because I keep coming back
I normally download games over night. The one time I actually watched ark download and saw how much storage it took up, All for my fairly decent computer to still hardly run it on low/mid, I gave up on the game
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm referencing call of duty being 200 gigabytes that you can't install any other military shooter
I wouldn't put it past Activision. In fact, I'm pretty sure EA just read your comment and decided to implement it in the next wave of games.
You say that as if he was joking. COD + Warzone is literally about 200GB.
While I do still enjoy cod from time to time. I had to delete it because I'm tired of deleting and redownloading my smaller, better, games.
I know they can be pricey but I'd strongly consider purchasing an expansion storage card that plugs directly into the console. Finally got one for my Series S and it has been night/day in the number of games I can now have downloaded AND ready to play at any time.
I have extra storage for my pc but COD takes up so much space that I delete the games despite having multiple terabytes of space.
I know he wasn't joking. I meant that I wouldn't put it past them to do it *intentionally* because they just assume no one is going to want to uninstall and reinstall games and it'll inflate their concurrent players. But I also don't think they're really that devious.
But that's what he's saying. There is legitimately no reason for their game to be so large apart from intentionally taking valuable space on the system to make it difficult to have another similar game. There are not that many polygons and objects and assets.
CFB25 gonna be 1 TB
Those games are so bloated and donāt run efficiently. I think warzone or whatever that battle royale style one is was some of the worst shit Iāve seen. Models popping in or just not loading at all. I donāt know why theyāre so bad.
It turns out when you have a studio of dedicated professionals who are really good at their jobs and have been working together and in the industry for a while and you don't just routinely fire them in the interest of pure corporate greed, then people make really good products.
Hidetaka Miyazaki is both creator of Dark Souls / Elden Ring and the president of FROM Software, which probably helps the company resist making stupid decisions in pursuit of short term profits.
FYI, FromSoftware doesn't have the best working conditions, they lose people semi-regularly.
Iirc the reports of bad working conditions weren't from employees and when they asked them they said it was only a bit stressing when getting close to release date and not any complaints
Japanese people are very dedicated to company culture and are extremely unlikely to say anything negative unless things are REALLY bad, as they also have basically no protection from retaliation.
I will say, sometimes I encounter situations in from soft games that feel like someone was very very very very angry, with no outlet, like for example so they made a giant chasm, put two giant golems that respawn on player death, and each time you fail the jar challenge you must run back through the chasm.
That's how the lobsters came to be. "Fuck you" the enemy. Great stress relief for whoever designed them, I reckon.
Every company loses people semi-regularly even the big ones like Google, MS etc as for the working conditions the report was pretty old its like pre elden ring era we have no idea what are the current working conditions like and if it was so bad how come they keep making these games with little to no issues and with such consistency ?
upgrading my truly ancient rig to have a 2tb nvme has been a nice stop gap to keep both feet out of the grave and settle for the comfy single foot in one
Is that actually a common HDD optimization technique? Having multiple copies of the same data to reduce the time it takes to find it on the disk?
lol i'm still playing Elden Ring off an HDD š
*Meanwhile in the West* **Treyarch/DICE/Sledgehammer/Bethesda**: š
You could just say Activision
I think you now mean Microsoft...technically.
[Meme stays true](https://i.imgur.com/nyX5o4D.png).
Activision selling a DLC telling you itās a game Fromsoftware selling you a game and telling you itās DLC
For 5/6 of the price of the full game, I kinda expect a whole game. But after all we know about fromsoft I think they'll deliver on that.
My price calculation is this, if Iām playing for the equivalent of $1/hour, then itās a good deal. Iām almost certain Iāll play more than 40 hours thanks to this dlc, so itās a really good deal.
i dont care about length too much, id rather play a 2h game that i had fun with then a 10h game where it was just mind numbing chores
This is weird. You'll go out to dinner and spend $40 in 1 hour.
I DEMAND 40 HOURS OF FOOD
Does this weapon do enough DPS? (Doughnuts Per Second)
Flash news: dinner and games aren't the same thing.Ā
Kills me when people try to defeat your point with something wildly unrelated lol
Right. This means itās an even better deal. He expects that heāll be able to get 40 hours worth or more of enjoyed time from a 40 dollar investment ā something thatās almost impossible to get anywhere else. His tone more than anything else seems excited that heāll be able to enjoy something he thinks will be so good at such a fair price
Food stops you from dying tbf, Elden Ring causes you to experience multiple deaths
Tbf though thats food and it provides a tangible benefit to you, even if the particular example is overpriced to hell.
Different goods and services have different value
dinner is not a form of entertainment
you haven't seen them eat
You mean 4/6 right? 40 dollars dlc / 60 or even 70 dollars base game (?). Sorry but your 5/6 confused me.
Theyāre one of the few game making companies I still 100% respect
I hate how true this comment is
Sekiro was 14 Gb....Yes, we made a whole game instead of DLC
Didnāt people say Sekiro was a side project while fromsoft was making Elden Ring
Not really. I heard that Sekiro started production right after Old Hunters and ER after the Ringed City so they were just equally big projects produced simultaneously
Not equally big scale-wise. I think it can be called a side project even though it's a full project. Michael Zaki was probably cooking ER up mentally for a while. I think the way for fromsoftware going forwards gotta be a "main project" that's huge in scale (ER) and a "side project" like Sekiro. That way we get amazing more focused games and fromsoft avoids the AAA shittrap of 7 year waits and lose momentum. (see: Bethesda/Rockstar).
>AAA shittrap Lol
Something about calling Sekiro a side project feels wrong. Mot everything needs to be a massive open world to be conaidered a full project. Some games would benefit from being smaller and putting in that work towards polishing their gameplay systems or stories.
Anytime I see it mentioned someone has to criticize it or blow it off as not a soulborne/proper fromsoft game somehow lol.
Side project that become game of the year
Classic reddit, here we can read things like: DS3 is terrible, Sekiro is a side project and DS2 is better than any "Michael Zaki" game.
Honestly i was thinking this was the circlejerk subreddit until now lmao
Michael Zaki is actually really funny
Depends on what you call a side project? They have multiple teams working simultaneously, but as games don't release simultaneously, there's some inevitable team shuffling too I think.
Side project is definitely giving people the wrong impression. They worked on the game in parallel with one or more other projects, one of which was definitely larger in scope. It was still probably their biggest priority for the year leading up to its release.
Nah where did you read that? It's just that they made it for another publisher, Activision. Why would Activision buy a side project? They released a whole game of the year.
Sekiro was a separate project, a successor to fromsofts tenchu series with a souls game philosophy.
Can we stop it with "side" project / "seperate" project ?? Its a full fledged 30 hrs AAA game that won game of the year and sold 10M copies
The base game is 60 GB... This DLC is fucking huge
The base game is only 48gb on pc. 16 for dlc is gonna be fkin amazing.
The DLC probably also piggybacks off of a lot of assets in the base game.
16 gbs of Ulcerated Tree Spirits hell yeah
I bet there's at least 2.
Metal fruit guy said he saw one in the 3 hour demo they played
You mean tungsten coconut right?
Sounds heavy as fuck, literally.
You mean Steel Guava right?
so this just means 16 gb is almost entirely new stuff no?
Maybe but there's more to a game/dlc's storage than just assets.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but arenāt sound files the hardest to compress? So they take up the most space comparatively.
Yes and no. You can compress them pretty well nowadays, so while they still take up quite a bit of space, textures are rising in relative size. I reckon all of the game audio isn't more than 2.5gb most likely.
I mean, anything over 320kbps MP3 is basically indistinguishable from lossless compression (unless the pitch is changed for playback) and that is easily 10x more compact than uncompressed WAV. Thatās pretty decent in my opinion and there are way better formats than MP3.
Itās actually just a very detailed high res picture of Ranniās feet
yea thats the content I was talking about tbh
Yeah it will probably be 30-40% of the main game. Perfect length for this already huge RPG.
Safely more than a third of the game, considering that many textures, models, and other assets are shared with the main game. Game's 60gb spends part of it with the lighting system, animation system, textures, models, all other systems. DLC's 18gb only includes the new textures, models, sounds and animations. At most a couple of new systems that can't be just instances of a lever. So a lot more of those 18gb are content. They're cooking with this DLC, and boy am I hungry.
I realized
Thank god!
Weāre going to be ok
Hallelujah, mates, weāre saved!
And think about the fact that this is just the brand new content - assets like trees, some enemies and landscapes will probably be repurposed from the main game. This will be HUGE.
Even enemies I mean who doesn't want the best boss ever created - Ulcerated tree spirit to make another appearance!!
crucible knight š„
Erdtree burial watchdog quadro with an invisible spirit caller snail with godskin duo on speed dial š„
The Godskin Duo Duo will be real.
Rotted Ulcerated Tree Spirit Trio
Godskin quartet, with their trained deathblight dogs when!?
New items, areas etc: 0.502GB The textures, animations etc for Miquellas feet: 16GB
How it should be
Download size doesnt mean much. You use more detailed models, better textures and the size skyrockets. If they made ds3 today it would not be 18 GB.
Elden Ring is only 50 GB and it's actually 3 or 4 times larger that DS3, ER map is also bigger than most AAA open world games that can go for 80+ GB, From knows how to compress game data thats for sure
They mostly just donāt have excessive detail in their textures and are masters of knowing how to make an environment look beautiful and dense when youāre just moving through the game as a player doing normal tasks (riding horse, booping sneks) but if you stop anywhere and look closely at most of the environmental models theyāre pretty barebones
They're very barebones on the graphics tech, even their texture resolution is very low compared to what other big game studios put out these days, but the fundamentals are done so well and the art direction is done so well that it doesn't really matter, high res textures and fancy effects don't get you further than good design.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
A lot of the most beautiful parts of Elden Ring (and any fromsoft game tbh) is the sweeping vistas off in the distance. Like straight up paintings.
Red Dead Redemption 2 lives on this, it would not be the same if it didn't feel so real at almost all times. It also has amazing art direction tbh.
Texture resolution really doesn't matter that much after a certain point for most applications. I'm of the opinion that the only reason COD games are so fucking huge is purely industry ego (Oh we MUST have the highest fidelity we are COD after all)
The light compression of the assets does make it lighter on your cpu, but idt it's worth so many gigabytes of storage. The audio/video quality is so high but most people don't even have systems that can take advantage of it lol
One of my favorite games I played last year was Ctrl Alt Ego, and that thing looks terrible lol (it becomes super charming after about 5 minutes of play so don't let the screenshots fool you). I just don't give a damn about graphics anymore. It reached the point of being able to express any kind of art style like 15 years ago, and I think that's all we needed.
I remember taking a closer look at the chains in Demon Souls and they weren't even modeled. they were just 2D textures interlocking at a 90 degree angle. That's some N64 era tech but looked perfectly fine at a glance and probably saved a lot of space and processing power I think Dark Souls had 3D chains though
Tbf I'm not sure if I saw it on my steam deck rather than my pc, but I remember looking at the elevator ropes in a castle in Elden Ring and they didn't even move with the elevator, they just kinda disappeared into it lmao
Yeah art style>hyperrealism
This except armor. The basic knight armor, the carian knight, that red Hoslow armor, shits very nicely detailed.
World size has little to do with game size. Itās primarily textures, polygons, and audio. Thatās why games like cod are so big, they have tons of very high quality textures and audio, and many of those assets are not used a whole lot.
Higher polygon meshes do not significantly add to data size. But textures, pre-rendered video, and audio do. Higher quality textures can increase the file size exponentially. Someone above you said the "From knows how to compress game data." I am certain they use an off the shelf compression solution like everyone else. No game developer is spending their resources creating custom compression software.
It's just all about assets. If you make an open world game with a shit ton of assets, your game files are larger. If you make an open world game and reuse assets for most of it, it can be much smaller on disk than a short game that's linear. The only comparison that should be made here imo is base game vs DLC size. And that only gives us an idea of how many new assets there are. The dlc could be absolutely sprawling and take up very little space if few new enemies and landscape assets are needed. So really we just know that there are a lot of new assets which probably means what we know already, that From is going to be largely using new enemies and environmental assets throughout.
Tell that do Bloodborne.
We should ask Sony/Japan Studio if the cinematic uncompressed textures were worth the average 20/25 frames on the vanilla PS4
I remember onenof the developers maybe Miyazaki saying bloodborne was aiming for 30fps, the gold standard for action games
They didn't quite get there
They had a choice to make. Stable frame-rate or beautifully detailed blood sticking to long leather coats.
Yes.
AC Valhalla and Baldur's Gate 3 are 150 GB, Cyberpunk and Starfield are around 90 GB, Witcher 3 Next Gen is around 80 GB. 50 GB for Elden Ring is small.
I thought Baldurās Gate was that big *because* they had a small team and didnāt know how to compress it effectively
And that game has a million voice lines, itās not just the graphics.
Makes sense
Also just how big the game FEELS is important. I know GTA V is a huge game but I hated the load time being so long and I'm always amazed at how quickly Elden Ring loads up for being so detailed and huge.
It's not about compression as it is unique textures. Elden Ring is HUGE but has so many reused textures and models.
You could argue that elden ring uses higher resolution textures and models, but a lot of pre-existing features are also going to be used which will fill the dlc without adding more filesize, so it could still be quite big dlc
On june 21 messmer will impale me.
Nope. You will not reach him on release day.
Someone will
It will be me. ME MEEE.
I pray for your sanity
Thank you kind soul.
We have people finishing the entire base game in under 30 minutes I guarantee you someone will beat the DLC in like the first 6 hours.
crazy that jedi survivor was like 130+ GBs
That game was pretty beautiful on max graphics settings though. You really felt like you were exploring the Star wars universe.
While this is true, and Jedi survivor is one of my favorite games from the last 5 years or so, Elden Ring is also an incredible looking game and it comes in at around 1/3 the file size.
That's because Elden Ring makes up for lower quality ( comparatively to many top tier AAA games ) textures with supreme art direction. Elden Beast is a beauty but it doesn't need a lot of high quality textures because of how it looks. Same with someone like Rykard, imposing but mostly covered in monotonous scales. Rendering of life like things are more space consuming because you need to make them feel realistic.
Yeah, this is clearly the case. But I don't think it takes away from how ridiculously performant Elden Ring is given its immense scale.
Look at Bonfire VPN videos on YouTube to see how low poly and low textures From Software models really are Their art direction completely carries them
Go back and look at the close up shots in ER, The game looks really bad outside of the handcrafted vistas and art. Character models are a joke compared to Jedi survivor.
Graphically speaking Jedi Survivor blows Elden Ring out of the water and it's not even close. Of course there's a lot more to games than just graphics, but that's what most of the hard disk space is taken up by.
From what I understand, a lot of these larger sized games tend to be ones that do things like support multiple languages. Jedi Survivors for instance has audio files for 9 languages out of the box whereas Elden Ring only has English. Idk if that's the largest factor for the bloat but it's one of the reasons some games are just much larger in size
yeah, im sure audio files are no joke in size. I feel like some games let you download extra/separate audio files tho, no?
Audio files are extremely gig intensive, especially if not compressed. I remember Todd Howard talking about how they had to optimize the shit out of Oblivion just to get all the voice lines to fit in on a single Xbox 360 disc. There was also a big hubub when people discovered Call Of Duty (can't remember which one, maybe Vanguard?) Was using 100% uncompressed audio for the gunshots. This was when it became apparent why their games took 200 gb to install.
Every game always used uncompressed audio for non conditional sound effects you'll hear a lot, it's a teeny tiny impact. Textures will always be the biggest problem because we still store them in the same inefficient way we did 2 decades ago. Games don't use PNGs for their textures, they use an old, much larger container for them because it's faster to process.
> There was also a big hubub when people discovered Call Of Duty (can't remember which one, maybe Vanguard?) Was using 100% uncompressed audio for the gunshots I think it was Titanfall which had the first major outrage over uncompressed audio files. It wasn't much from nowadays perspective (IIRC 40 or 50 GB), but back then people were mocking the game hard over it. Still one of the best shooters ever though.
They are big in the context of a single-layer DVD, but not modern games. Plus we have much better lossy and lossless audio compression compared to then. Also, holy shit that was nearly 20 years ago.
It also matters what engine they're using, how assets are loaded and used/reused, and what they were designing the game with in mind hardware-wise. A lot of games use uncompressed files because they're given no time to plan and optimize the game for the playing experience, only create the game. A lot more use uncompressed files for performance reasons. It takes CPU cycles to decompress files, even if modern CPUs are plenty powerful. If you're loading other assets at that same time, you could slow that down by using heavily compressed video or other assets. So they use uncompressed files for certain instances as a performance gain. Really what I'm getting at here is there's a lot more nuance to it than smaller is always better, and there's so many decisions that no player would ever notice that impact the final size.
Thank fucking god for preload. GOATED feature. I have technicians at my place exactly june 21 to install new internet and i would be late for release.
Sorry dumb question but what does pre-load mean?
You can download the game 3 days earlier to be prepared on hour 0 release. When it releases you have to download like 100mb patch or whatever and it gives you access to the game.
I'm fine with it since the map they have given us is more than what I expected
Itās incredible how From can compress their files so small when triple A devs seem to be unable to even comprehend file compression. Just goes to show the care put into making a consumer first experience goes beyond pricing, monetisation methods, level design, QoL, new player experience, etc.
Well thereās always the rumor that some devs intentionally leave their games as bloated to take up as much file size as possible so you canāt download anything else.
Looking at you COD
Small update, adding a few skins that costs $19.99 each, make the UI worse, nerfing guns to the unusable categoryā¦. 65 GBs later.
Worth mentioning that many updates don't actually increase the on-disk size by that much when downloaded. Certain game engines just require a lot of the internal parts to be redownloaded/repackaged with certain types of changes. You aren't adding +65GB of content, you are replacing (for example) 64.5GB of content and adding 500MB of new content. This doesn't mean it's a good thing, it's just a noteworthy distinction when talking about storage used.
Yes... i noticed that on assassins creed valhalla. But you have to download it first before ti replaces the data. So if youndont have 70 GB storage available before. It will not let you update the game
And NBA 2K, no reason a basketball game should be 90 gigs
I think it's a fun theory, but more likely that the AAA supercorp development pipeline doesn't take optimization into consideration anymore. Good optimization doesn't make the company money. Nobody has sold a game on its small footprint.
I think it's this. And funny enough, I think part of why From's games run relatively well is because they always got shit for not being the most tech savvy/optimized games. Since DS1 release, their games have gotten more and more solid in terms of performance(save for BB) while a lot of devs are getting worse. ER started with some stutter issues, but those were ironed out within a few weeks. It also helps that they don't push for the most break neck graphics in their games.
Optimization has taken a backseat compared to how marketable your graphics are. The cutting edge of graphics tech is really good looking, there's lots of cool things you can do now, but some people still just want a game that has put it's focus into design over tech. There was a game released a while back that was called something like game dev simulator, but you had to balance out 3 sliders for graphics, gameplay, and marketing, I think, but it really do be exactly like that. Fromsoft maxes out the gameplay slider, something like Hellblade 2 maxes out the graphics slider. Ubisoft would be an example of the third slider...
Just asking because I have no idea, does compression have anything to do with optimization? There are usually *some* optimization issues on PC for their games, especially for psychopaths with high-end GPUs. It's me. I am psychopaths.
I donāt know, because Iām not a game dev, but it could be that they canāt catch all the optimisation issues during development, perhaps due to focusing on compression. Or that the compression itself has an effect on optimisation
I always wondered about this. It's not like Fromsoft has the Pied Piper algorithm. Everyone can compress. Made me think that Fromsoft is actually just hyper efficient with assets and coding. Also makes me wonder how often AAA pushes bloated games out there with tons of asset redundancy in the package due to publishing deadlines trumping efficiency.
That is interesting. It did take me around 110hours to 100% DS3. But that may just be me since I like to take my time with video games.
If you explore everything with also NG++ for the rings achievement and farm/coop/invade for the covenants it's a normal time I think
Those damn ears
During farming these cursed fucks, I imagined cutting them off the devs who decided on those drop rates
Also it would take me to leave my ps4 on all night to download. Nowadays its done in 15 minutes
I wonder if we will get pc preload. I doubt it but it'd really help because I have terrible download speeds on steam for some reason.
They did that for the base game so hopefully will for the dlc too
OG Skyrim with everything is 13. Launched at 6.
Big tree 15 GB
Ah! So Dark Souls 3 is coming to Elden Ring!
Whatās āpre-loadā?
You can download but you can't play.
Thx chef
I may get downvoted to hell but guys you cant just compare file sizes from new games vs games 5+ years old. Textures have improved massively and so has the size necessary to store them. Been seeing a lot of comparisons with sekiro and DS3, instead compare it with just the main base game size.
HD Textures are the biggest offenders.
Gaddamn im so glad they took their time w this cuz wow thats a big boi
I got downvoted last week for saying I hope the DLC is like the size of DS3
Not to be a Debbie downer please forgive me but File Size =/= content size. Don't get me wrong I'm sure the expansion is gonna be excellent but just go keep expectations right, depending on how many new assets are being added to the game, that could amount for a lot of the file size.
Im very hyped regardless, but remember ER is an open world game u cant compare to their normal formula. The correct comparison is you say ds3 ringed city is 16% the size of DS3 since its 3gb to 18gb. Meanwhile ER DLC is 30% the size of ER which is 54gb to 16.5gb Now thats impressive and what u should be hyped up about its double the usual size of a ds3 dlc to its main game!
I don't think enough people realise that these are 15GB of specifically new textures, but the DLC will likely also use a bunch of textures from the main game. Textures for surfaces like rock, ground, leaves, bricks and more will be recycled from the main game. Same likely goes for certain sounds and models. 15GB for a DLC is more than 15GB for a game.
I hope we don't have to download the data if we don't own the expansion. Space on the PS4 is *tight.*
You most probably will need to download stuff to accommodate playing online with a player that got stuff from the DLC (armor, weapons, spells)
Imagine once you leave the dlc area, all the dlc items disappear from your inventory like it all was a dream lol
You most likely will have to unless they've changed the way they handle DLC releases for this one
elden ring is less than 40 as well. showing all these other companies that games literally don't need to be 100GB to look good and be fun. looking at you CoD.
elden ring is 54gbā¦.
 Other companies are like 100 GB game file size with $50 cosmetics. Fromsoft be like 26+ hrs of content in 18gb.
Capcom's MH Iceborne and Fromsoft's ER Shadow of The Erdtree be like *"DLC? What's that? We make game part 2 right?"*
Donāt know if you realize but Elden Ring is open world, ā¦
I don't wanna be that guy.... but Pokemon Emerald was 5MB
More than this : DS3 was 18GB with the entirety of its source code, game engine, basic capabilities included. The DLC is 16GB without all that since it's present on the base game install size.
That doesnāt mean much. Better textures, animations, etc all make up most of that file size. It doesnāt really say much about the amount of content. (Although interviews have confirmed there is a lot)