Why is it when the game patches it downloads all 130 gigs again.

[Dagungus]

Am I missing something here? Why is this a thing, it shouldn't be that big of a gdamn patch.

[Ryzilynt]

My patch is 26.23gb

[Kafik]

It is a big patch, very big content wise. After my update though I actually gained space on my HDD so seems like it overwrote old game files and cleaned things up.

[Recjawjind]

Issue with the appmanifest and/or state.patch file generated by steam.
Relatively widespread and common issue.

[Mormacil]

You are, they're not 130 GBs. This one was under 30 GBs. What's happening is they edit 130 GBs worth of archives. That has to do with how the engine compresses data to save space on your drive. Steam used to not list those actiosn but now it does.

So the patch is downloaded and then needs to be integrated into the existing archives. This saves a lot of bandwidth compared to downloading the new archives wholesale. That would come significantly closer to the 130 GBs of a patch. A downside is editing the archives locally takes significantly more time. So if you're in a high speed no data cap area like Western Europe it can be faster to just redownload the entire game.

[Babbles]

Mine downloaded and patched 3 times - in the end I had to uninstall - 3 failed verifies on a 120GB patch? Nope, not going for a fourth.

[Chaosolous]

It's unpacking not downloading. The patch is ~26GB compressed and decompresses to 130GB after.

It's annoying but that's gaming in 2023.

[ymarcotte55]

mine was 27.8GB - its a patch ... you're looking at the wrong numbers ... 130GB is what is being patched, not the patch itself.

[Orion Invictus]

It doesn't.

1 - Patch gets downloaded.
2 - "Clusters" of files that take up 130 GB get unpacked. These clusters contain the files that need to be replaced with the ones from the patch. For safety reasons, the files are copied when unpacked, hence the game will (temporarily) take up more space.
3 - Once these clusters have been unpacked, the files within are replaced.
4 - Once the files have been replaced, the clusters are repacked and replace the originals.

It's a very common patching process.

[zacharyb]

I'm kinda surprised Steam doesn't have a FAQ on the downloads page at this point.

[Ryzilynt]

Originally posted by Mormacil:

You are, they're not 130 GBs. This one was under 30 GBs. What's happening is they edit 130 GBs worth of archives. That has to do with how the engine compresses data to save space on your drive. Steam used to not list those actiosn but now it does.

So the patch is downloaded and then needs to be integrated into the existing archives. This saves a lot of bandwidth compared to downloading the new archives wholesale. That would come significantly closer to the 130 GBs of a patch. A downside is editing the archives locally takes significantly more time. So if you're in a high speed no data cap area like Western Europe it can be faster to just redownload the entire game.

Or if you have a good internet connection and a powerful rig it will will be faster without downloading the entire game.

The download took about 5-6 mins, the patch/install only took a few minutes more.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by Ryzilynt:

Originally posted by Mormacil:

You are, they're not 130 GBs. This one was under 30 GBs. What's happening is they edit 130 GBs worth of archives. That has to do with how the engine compresses data to save space on your drive. Steam used to not list those actiosn but now it does.

So the patch is downloaded and then needs to be integrated into the existing archives. This saves a lot of bandwidth compared to downloading the new archives wholesale. That would come significantly closer to the 130 GBs of a patch. A downside is editing the archives locally takes significantly more time. So if you're in a high speed no data cap area like Western Europe it can be faster to just redownload the entire game.

Or if you have a good internet connection and a powerful rig it will will be faster without downloading the entire game.

The download took about 5-6 mins, the patch/install only took a few minutes more.

Pedantically pointing out 5 minutes of download time is not a good internet connection but you're right there's a cut off point where patching picks up and becomes faster again.

[GromGaru]

The unpacking of the patch takes ages for me, the 30gb download was fast but then, it was super slow to update the game, steam gaves me some weird time estimation going over than a month... I simply uninstalled the game and re-instal the whole stuff and it was just a 20 minutes job.

[Orion Invictus]

Originally posted by GromGaru:

The unpacking of the patch takes ages for me, the 30gb download was fast but then, it was super slow to update the game, steam gaves me some weird time estimation going over than a month... I simply uninstalled the game and re-instal the whole stuff and it was just a 20 minutes job.

Staging folder issue.

Long story short, Steam decided it'd be better to download the patch to a slow(er) drive than the one the game is installed on, so that drive is bottlenecking the whole process.

[Cartesian Duelist]

Originally posted by Chaosolous:

It's annoying but that's gaming in 2023.

No no. I've been assured many hundreds of times that BG3 is the greatest game of all time because it's not like all the others. That lame excuse ain't gonna fly here.

[Noctoculus]

Originally posted by Cartesian Duelist:

Originally posted by Chaosolous:

It's annoying but that's gaming in 2023.

No no. I've been assured many hundreds of times that BG3 is the greatest game of all time because it's not like all the others. That lame excuse ain't gonna fly here.

It's not like all the others. It's 4 times the size of most games.