Dear Expansive Worlds - what's wrong with your update sizes?

[krzychuzokecia]

Sorry for clickbait title, but seriously - last friday I downloaded CoTW after 3-year hiatus. 36 gigs worth of downloading. Today Steam notifies me about 22GB update, which (after putting it in download que) somehow turns in 34GB of download. So, essentially I have to re-download the whole game for apparently 3 new rifles (DLC I don't own), a few new skins (DLC I don't own), and maybe, maybe new free lodge (but I'm not sure if it's part of this update).

Why? Your games - CoTW and GenZero - are the only games I've seen which have such large downloads. At least CoTW allows me to download the update - with GenZero I couldn't download last 14GB update due to "not enough disk space" even when I had 40+ GB of free space on a perfectly working drive.

I don't know if it's because of compression algorithm you use, or file structure of your games, or both, but it's just awful from customer point of view.

[krzychuzokecia]

I don't think it's normal - I get what you mean, but the fact that I can download the way bigger update to CotW, but not smaller one for GenZ (while having exactly the same 40 gigs of free space, which is more than twice of what GenZ wanted to download) makes me think there's more to that.

[Fulgurator Roch]

Why is there still no bugfix for the Sabot of the Blackpowdergun?

[El Poto]

EW downloader/installer is a POS. More than one hour and still at 66% of the 22Gb. A download that should've taken 30 minutes top. And I know it also has to do the update process itself, however, most Steam games download everything first and then do the update but for some reason EW is uncapable of doing the same.

[Geronimo]

A question.

Are some of these files replacing old files, where the download isn't adding to the game folder, but just rewriting?

A patch might consist of 20 gigs, but only 2 gigs of brand new data is actually placed in the game folder because much of the content was just the rewriting of data already contained there.

I can see the amount of time being a problem for those without the extra free time to spare, but it would be nice to know exactly how much of a download is actually additional content.

[Professor Goat]

there's literally a rather large patch note that yall are choosing to ignore. and youre also choosing to not understand how patching works. lmao

[astreamuser]

Originally posted by Geronimo:

A question.

Are some of these files replacing old files, where the download isn't adding to the game folder, but just rewriting?

A patch might consist of 20 gigs, but only 2 gigs of brand new data is actually placed in the game folder because much of the content was just the rewriting of data already contained there.

I can see the amount of time being a problem for those without the extra free time to spare, but it would be nice to know exactly how much of a download is actually additional content.

Around 2GB is the new content for this update, the rest is just a patch for the old files. EW is notorious for rushing to release their update which means they don't have much time to deal with bug fixing and thinking things through. That means they'll re-iterate and update many of the old stuff as well and that's why the size is usually too big. They are also capable of delivering small updates, we've seen this often in the past. I would be more worried if the updates were small. Also, a big update always indicates changes to the assets of the game (sounds, textures, maps etc.) which is usually a good thing. This isn't an educated guess, i've seen with my eyes changes to the reserves when they were claiming that they did not change anything, a recent example was the in-game DLC menu update (update was 18GB)

The explanation "not many things changed so why the update is so big, their system sucks etc." is just BS. Almost never holds true. EW is also at fault here because they prefer to lie to people instead of giving a reasonable explanation for the large patch sizes. Go figure.

[Iki]

I have this game on a ssd. For the last hour, the update on steam has been constantly changing between downloading, updating and validating, over and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over.

The last 2 or 3 times this crap game updated, I had to end up uninstalling and reinstalling, because it was just faster to download 70gb than to wait for this stupid, retarded way of updating a game. But my patience is 100% depleted.

I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ done too. Uninstalled this pos for good.

[Artic]

Sorry, but there is 0 reason for this update to be 20 GBs other then the lack of compression in its files, I mean seriously what is taking up 20 GBs? Is it 8k textures for the Trophy house (textures that should already be in the game no less) 16k textures for the guns? Like, the trophy house and the gun models themselves should only be 3 GBs or a little more, not 20 GBs.

And aside from all the changes in code they've done, those don't even warrant close to a gigabyte.

[OscarMike]

wouldnt you need to have all the same update data despite not having the same dlc as others for continuity purposes? I mean like with the ability to play on maps in multi player that you dont own?

[CptnSpandex]

Originally posted by Snail Rancher:

Originally posted by krzychuzokecia:

Well, enlighten me good sir, then! You're saying that some small fixes in configs and binaries (which all are text files for all intents and purposes) are worth re-downloading almost all the game data?

And yes, Steam is now currently re-downloading almost the whole game, as I suddenly got 70 gigs of free space on my drive, and CoTW folder now has only 1.66GB worth of data. This is awfully inefficent.

There is a trophy lodge, the new loadout system, and more than a few bug fixes. Since the bug fixes are over all the DLC reserves as well, which need to be downloaded so they can be used in multiplayer (for free). All of that adds up. Most games with a large DLC library have the same issue.

They actually do not mate, so far for call of the wild this is one of the largest updates i have seen for a long long time, 22gb for a 72gb game is nearly 1/3 of the entire game files size !!!!, and it is not like it is downloading a small bit and distributing it throughout all the files which people mistake for a large download, this download for this game is HUGE mate. I do not care though as long as it benefits the game, just bought both new dlc's and came here to see what the hell was in that download.