Larian has finally confirmed that preloading won’t be available, apparently because of a limitation with Steam.

  • CALIGVLA@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    What in the fuck. Can devs please start compressing this shit better? I know this is more of a me problem, but this is like half my SSD just for this game alone. Ridiculous.

    • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I know this is more of a me problem

      Naw naw fuck that fam, this is very much a them problem. 122gb is fucking ridiculous.

      • iNeedScissors67@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I was going to install CoD: Cold War from PS+ on my PS5 since I wanted to check out the campaign but I’d never buy it. Fuckin 230 GB for that shit. I lol’d a bit and moved on to something else. So ridiculous.

        • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Lmao 230gigs fuck that. Sitting here cursing my own life because I have 10 gigs of Sims 4 mods. For 230GB the game better come with a hologram that pops out of a USB port to suck my fucking cock.

          • iNeedScissors67@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            The only games I’ll bother keeping installed that are over 100gb are my ESO with all the addons on PC, and Star Wars Battlefront II on PS5, and only because my friends and I play co-op every Friday night. But it’s still ludicrous. My most played game recently, Battlebit Remastered, is a whopping 3 GB lol.

      • Raji_Lev@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Just one more reason why the obsession with the latest greatest OMGWTF HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS is the worst thing to happen to gaming since the Atari Jaguar.

        • LoafyLemon@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          We can compress textures into ridiculously small sizes, I doubt it’s a problem. Audio on the other hand…

          In a dialogue heavy game such as this one, each voice line for each language must be shipped with the game on steam. There’s no way to split the downloads between regions and languages from within developer console on steam.

          I think it’s one of the most popular requests devs posted in the dev forums.

    • ZickZack@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Standard lossless compression (without further assumptions) is already very close to being as optimal as it can get: At some point the pure entropy of these huge datasets just is not containable anymore.

      The most likely savior in this case would be procedural rendering (i.e. instead of storing textures and meshes, you store a function that deterministically generates the meshes and textures). These already are starting to become popular due to better engine support, but pose a huge challenge from a design POV (the nice e.g. blender-esque interfaces don’t really translate well to this kind of process).

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      What they need to do is utilize steam’s branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.

      The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have “great on deck” be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don’t need at 800p

    • EvaUnit02@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.

    • that_one_guy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m sure that what can be compressed is compressed in these game files. What we really need is more intelligent assets. When downloading, the platform should take your localization settings and only download the assets required for that locale. I bet this would heavily reduce the size of many of these games.

      • QHC@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think that localization would help much. Most, probably all, assets that are taking up so much storage space are not going to include language directly.

      • crystalcorvid@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’d be willing to bet that the game will be available in a compressed format from a repack site with no content loss. At least 30% smaller. A recent example that I just checked, Forspoken, Original Size: 103.9 GB Repack Size: from 63.6 GB

        Before I had an unlimited connection for monthly bandwidth usage I would frequently download an already purchased game from the repack site and then have steam “repair” it. Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War come to mind specifically. Saved so much of my limits at the time.

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Eh… you can have high quality assets or you can have small size, but you can’t have both.

      Game assets are typically some of the most heavily compressed assets there are (it’s often quicker, even from SSDs, to load a compressed asset and uncompress it than otherwise). There’s an entire middleware industry grown up around minimising asset sizes while keeping quality. 122 GB to me just screams “this game is fucking massive” rather than “this game is horribly unoptimised”.