Why is it only 23 Gb?

[Cody]

Is there more to download on release or something? 23 gb seems low.

[Wight]

Download size != Game size.

[Randy Feltface]

That's already twice the size of Skyrim.

[El Presidente los burritos]

Originally posted by yusupov:

just why ISSS this game 23 gigabytes? whoooooooooooooooo can say?? why isnt it 82 gigabytes? 4 gigabytes? i want to know, was there one guy sitting there who, when he heard its "its 23 gigabytes" just said, "yeah, that sounds about right."

-jerry seinfeld, march 1992

LOL, that's gold m8.

People are seriously freaking out about the DL-size not being mega-tits huge like GTA V?

[Morrandir]

TW3 35 gb
Mad Max 32 gb
MGSV Phantom Pain 28 gb

These are all how much hard drive space they take up

FO4 will take up 30 GB when uncompressed

So nothing out of the ordinary here.

[Barman]

Thanks for the answers. I wondered the same thing.
Also, I didn't have the chance to choose the language when I started the download. Will I have to download it all over again if I decide to change it ? (I live in France and I really, really don't want to hear french dialogues. Our voice acting always sucks.)

Ususally you don't have to download the whole game, but extra language files which can amount to several Gigabytes of data. I'm French as well, but always play in English and Steam never allows me to choose the language before installing the game. I always have to go into properties after the install is done, to manually change the language... which triggers another download of 4 to 5 Gb depending on the game of course.
Not convenient at all.

[DoyleDeth]

Originally posted by =EGC= _Nite_:

Originally posted by Donald J Trump for President:

It's because there's not a whole lot of content. Don't dodge the obvious answer.

its suppose to have 400 hours of content, skyrim had about the same ammount

They said that they were playing 400 hours and were still finding loads of new areas and things to do, so it's far beyond 400 hours. I'd even say 800 hours or more.

[slugmite]

hehehehehe.....if you think the download was smallish, wait for the console babies to start whining....STEAM/bethesda screwed up and sent out the WRONG X-box stream....gotta do it alllllll again, Box-babes. heheeheheheheheheheheehhehehe

oops...er...uh...I mean...awwwww....sorry, kids. honest...mean it sincerely...yep. luvs ya.

[Пыль глотаю]

Originally posted by Pepper:

Just gonna leave this little bit of rant on cooked data here:

Cooked data is the reason most modern games are too huge. only exceptions being R.A.G.E. games (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) like gta IV/V and Max payne 3, which simply just have too much data for their own good (and they could have optimized alot of their file types better), and IdTech 5 games, RAGE, Wolfenstien New Order/Old Blood, which use a terribly strange texture system, using unique textures for every surface in the game, and even if using a lower res, storing a different hand made texture for every rock or scattered debris in the world map instead of the standard, using a few tiled textured and adding some overlays for unique grime or detail is a bad idea.

Cooked data speeds up console load time, and frees up memory. expecially when a game has content streamed from a dvd/blu-ray disc while playing, but is still aplicable to HDD installed games. the stock hard drives used in the xbox one and the ps4 aren't all that great, 5400rpm and 8-16mb cache at best.

So what is Cooked data? why it's when you figure out what game assets are used in each level, place them in a file loaded for each level, then it only loads what it needs. Unreal engine 3/4 can do this, but Dice was the first to announce they did this with their frostbite engine and Bad Company. around that time, alot of unreal engine 3 games also started cooking data to speed up load times. In reality, COD4's "Fast files" might actually have been the first to do this, it just wasnt called cooked data then.

So why is this bad? well, instead of having a few main archives around 1-2gb the game goes into (typically by copying into active memory/ram) and then loads the specific files from, you have 20+ individual files each totalling 500mb to 1gb, each containing some of the same data over and over. but it speeds up level loading and reduces memory overhead, so alot of games do this and when the pc port comes they dont bother uncooking the data. simply because it would mean the pc specs to run would be higher (needs more ram for starters) and most pcs do get a bit of a loading time boost from this. but it comes at the cost of much higher disk usage.


Bad company 2 would have been 4 gb instead of 12gb when you account for all the dupes across all the .fbrb files (frostbite resource bundles).
COD4 would have been 3gb instead of 6gb. based on dupes in .FF files (fast files).
and my personal favorite abomination, MW3 would have been a bit under 5gb, but instead it's 15gb.
Arkham city/knight is a TERRIBLE offender of this. I dont own knight, but I looked at and unpacked some of the files on a friend's rig. Not enough to say for sure, but for city, the game would have been 7.5-ish gb instead of 20gb. Origins was done a bit smarter, having some common resource bundles but then still some level-specific repeated files. It would have only shaved 2-4gb off of the 15gb maybe, didnt do a full tally on that one.


BF3 and later got a bit smarter about it too, not fully elimating the practice, but adding a common resource pool for some of the most repeated data. Pretty sure after bad company 2's huge gbs and gbs of patches they realized the mistake of having all data be cooked. they also adopted a new methodology, by making updated downloads representative of existing files they patch, but capable of preserving existing content from them that they dont include. so if the updated cas01.cat doesnt mention a specific .ebx file, the game just uses the original ebx from the game files pre-update.


Still could have shaved off a good bit of GB in those cases, but all the largest games (recent CODs and rockstar rage engine games/idtech 5 games) are just doing it wrong.

Very informative, however the idtech 5 engine I thought from a programming perspective was straight up ingenious. But in a uncontrolled environment was poorly planned. But in a good setup designed for it the lag was almost imperceptible. Cooked data is just a fact of life for modern games. Are there any AAA games that don't have it? No, because data is cheap. It's a cost passed on to the consumer.

[Nite69]

Originally posted by Doyledeth:

Originally posted by =EGC= _Nite_:

its suppose to have 400 hours of content, skyrim had about the same ammount

They said that they were playing 400 hours and were still finding loads of new areas and things to do, so it's far beyond 400 hours. I'd even say 800 hours or more.

800 I doubt, though they did say the game map was like 3 times bigger then Fallout 3 so maybe

[Diarkus]

Originally posted by IcyDeadPeople:

Compression of the megabytes and giga bytes for safety reasons, if they are uncompressed wrong it'll unleash a magnetron and blow your face off.

+1 internets

[Dan loeb]

Originally posted by Grenadeh:

It's low to be honest. I was expecting 50 gb unpacked size, minimum.

Originally posted by Mrdante/Darkedone02:

30 GB is not small what so ever... neighter is 23... that's like the average size of a total war game.

Yes. The difference being this is an actual fully 3d game with an explorable world. Total War has randomly generated battle maps and doesn't have to store much more than model files and textures for units and those maps.

30 gb is small to be honest. When console games are generally weighing in at 40+ gb like Far Cry 4, MGS5, Wolfenstein, Titanfall, Evolve, etc, either Bethesda did a good job of compression, or they packed a lot of tiny ass AND compressed on top of that, textures and models into this game.

Fallout doesnt cook their data per level. I already covered this on page 3. MGS V is 28gb, and thats reasonable for it. far cry 4 is the WORST pc port to bring into this, not only does it have alot of dupes despite NOT using cooked data, the formats arent optimized for file size on pc. Titanfall is 38GB of AUDIO. and 12GB of game. Why? well simply because they're idiots and stored over half of the files as 8-track raw audio, when for almost all those files 2-6 of those tracks are just 0db constant (not used, but still stored raw (no compression means 5 seconds of silence takes up as much space as 5 seconds of noise) during initial audio decompression when installing content on first run.) Wolfenstien uses the most idiotic texture system for it's levels, where every bit of every wall is painted in editor, instead of using tiles textures with overlays for unique details. Have you every looked at the new order's files? 38gb is just the texture pages. and 8gb is actual game sounds, character models, other meshes, and non-world (npc/clutter etc) textures, etc.

Also preloads are always compressed and encrypted so you cant poke around before hand. they also dont include exes and dlls just on the off chance someone tries to brute force it and gets lucky. the game without season pass content (which wont be out for pass holders on release anyways) is 30gb. the archives the game uses are most likely compressed. probably a new version of bsa (bethesda softworks archive) just like skyrim had a new version of fallout 3's, and fallout 3 had a new version of the original ones in oblivion.

[Dan loeb]

Originally posted by RonaldRaygun:

Very informative, however the idtech 5 engine I thought from a programming perspective was straight up ingenious. But in a uncontrolled environment was poorly planned. But in a good setup designed for it the lag was almost imperceptible. Cooked data is just a fact of life for modern games. Are there any AAA games that don't have it? No, because data is cheap. It's a cost passed on to the consumer.

I will say the logic behind idtech 5 and carmack's plans for idtech 6 and onward looked amazing on paper. But I would say a more ideal way to handle megatextures would be akin to what quake enemy territory (idtech 4 mp game, had megatextures) did with it (10 or so multiplayer maps using it) versus Rage's use of it (big open world). Open world isnt really suited to mega textures, because more visibility means more unique textures to store. The new order does make use of far more consistent objects in corridors, and uses a sort of prefab system indoors to make the texture quality overall better than Rage, while still being around the same file size.

TW3 doesnt use cooked data. Most open world games dont use cooked data because they are just one big world and then interior cells. MGSV doesnt use cooked data, and its engine is a work of art that puts other engines to shame in scalability and ratio of performance needed for visual quality. Pretty sad they wont liscense it, fox engine itself is the crowning achievement of kojima studios.

Call of duty is pretty much the king of cooked data. around the time they transitioned to the next gen consoles, their filesizes shot up ridiculously high. they started packing all textures per level, not just level specific ones. those .xpak/.ipak files? thats them. funny thing is the games dont even look that amazing, outside of pre-rendered cgi cutscenes that dont count at all, I'm looking at you advanced warfare, or certain player allies in scripted scenes.

[code]

I think I remember them saying they were doing one more content update. I think it will be only system files tho.

[Dan loeb]

Originally posted by DrStrangeStuff:

Partial download op.

If steam gave you the entire download, someone would crack steam's shoddy drm in an hour. They give you the majority of the game just not all of it.

The would have to brute force the decrytion key needed for the preload files. key goes live on steam servers moments before game launches. also typically all thats missing is the exes and dlls, all game content files are in preload.

Originally posted by Chase(InfamousFleet):

i cant even find the files on my harddrive

Steam\steamapps\depotcache the .csd files are here. they are encrypted using assymetric encryption, and executables arent included. when preload unlocks, executables will be downloaded and generated with Steam CEG protections (ties game's executable to your steam account via a few file and registry checks)

[slugmite]

Too much yabber jabber. Want a spot of fun? spend a few minutes figuring out where, inside your machine, STEAM HID all this data!! Clue: clicking the cutsie icon on your desktop aint taking ya there. heheheheh...