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Sea Of Thieves' New Xbox Update Is Almost 100GB, But There's A Good Reason For It
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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I was planning to buy Sea of Thieves last week, but my friend bought it first and warned me about the size.
It looks really fun, but not 100GB fun.
Also, if the dev kit really costs 100GB of space, I predict further wins for the indie retro game makers.
(Edit: The Dev kit costing 100GB seems to be a misquote by the article. Sea of Thieves release notes blame kit updates for the overall size, but not for all of it. https://www.seaofthieves.com/release-notes)
Fun fact: 100GB is enough space to store every single video game ever made until around mid 1995.
Systems before the N64 don't really meaningfully use up any of your 100GB. The entirety of everything ever published for the Atari takes less space, combined, than a three page Word document.
The N64 library is the earliest game system to take up a meaningful portion of your 100GB, with every published game combined adding up to almost 32GB.
The 1995 date is because the PlayStation One finally released, with a huge launch catalog, and some games that take up to 3GB each, adding enough storage to the whole world's gaming library to finally push through the 100GB.
While I agree that 100gb is big this is such a weird take. I'm no game making expert but you're comparing games that used low bitrate audio (no voice over for the most part) had 2D sprites, and 3D characters with 300 polys max to games that use HD textures, have high poly detailed characters, use high bitrate audio (most games have thousands of lines of dialogue) and pre rendered cutscenes that are usually even higher quality than the games graphics. There is just so much more than there use to be and such higher quality. It's like saying pamphlets are better than books because I can shove more of them in my bag.
A lot of games for early consoles and PCs also had to optimise and squeeze the last few kilobytes out of the space that was available to them in distribution - which forced some devs to compromise on quality and others became extremely crafty and made completely novel approaches for data compression at the time. This may be just my personal opinion but i feel like games that pushed the envelope, furthered mechanics and technology beyond what everybody else was doing and therefore needed smart devs with good ideas to actually pull it off.. just were more fun to play. Today studios can throw assets like you described uncompressed on a server and call it a day, less consideration, faster development turnover, better for the publishers but probably not as polished of a game. Not saying that only uber-brainiacs who can code in 10 different assembly dialects should make games but rather that more bigger, more polys, more resolution, more everything is not always better.
Pamphlets are indeed better imo if they convey the same information as a 500 page book that describes everything in excruciating detail 🙃
I guess you've got me there. I do prefer straight to the point if it's just giving me factiy information. But for a story like In a game I feel the "book" would still be my choice. The details is what makes it good (for most games).