this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Modern Warfare 3 download is huge (200GB) due to “increased amount of content” (www.pcgamesn.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Ah, yes. The "let's bloat our game size to bully other games off your SSD so you'll be reluctant to ever uninstall it, because reinstalling it would be a big pain, that way you'll play it indefinitely and give us extra money in micro transactions" strategy.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ah, yes. The "let's bloat our game size to bully other games off your SSD so you'll be reluctant to ever uninstall it, because reinstalling it would be a big pain, that way you'll play it indefinitely and give us extra money in micro transactions" strategy.

I don't think that's really the strategy at play. It seems more like they are under the impression that it's not their problem and gamers will do what they can to play.

Activision then clarifies that “as part of our ongoing optimization efforts, your final installation size will be actually smaller than the combined previous Call of Duty experiences” and goes on to say we can manage all of the files “in the ‘manage files’ section of the CoD HQ launcher menu.” This means that any unused content that you find you’re not actively playing through is available to selectively uninstall.

I would say they just don't care but the above line is a welcome addition.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The idea behind it is that they no longer compress anything because there’s a minor performance benefit. Add in 2k and 4k resolution textures for everything and you’ve got a massive game.

But I also wouldn’t be surprised if they want it to take up so much space that uninstalling and reinstalling it would be too much work, so you just play their game

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not really though. The HW accelerated compression algorithms are quite fast and use dedicated hardware that's not doing anything if you aren't using it for that, and it actually increases the effective I/O speeds significantly - this was a huge part of the "road to PS5" presentation by Cerney a few years back.

The problem is that it means optimizing for each target platform. Which is more expensive than not optimizing for any platform. So guess which one Activision does?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Platform specific asset optimisations are completely automated these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I would be curious if a large game would push people towards installing or uninstalling more. Personally I keep the 10GB indie titles on my Steam Deck and uninstall anything over 100GB.

Unless you are pirating the game and need to redownload it I wouldn't give uninstalling it a second thought.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, it's not a conspiracy to make people play the game, it's that efficient code costs more, and the bloat doesn't effect their sales enough to pay coders to make it efficient

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

you can't write 200 GB of code unless you're GPT. Those files are all needlessly high quality models and textures, environments, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Are they just leaving their textures uncompressed for the performance advantage that would offer? It's pretty much common practice now to just compress them and have the game engine decompress them on the fly, but that does have a significant performance cost.

I could see it making a difference if they are going for "twitch" shooter. But I don't know enough about shooters to know if that is the gameplay style cod is going for, or if that is even a term for shooters people use anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They are probably using DirectStorage to increase game performance, that means that the only compression available to them is GDEFLATE. And that's not the most efficient algorithm for photo like images as used in textures.