125
= massive uncompressed textures.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Textures that you don't have access to because they are all locked behind micro transactions, but one whale is going to buy them all so your machine has to be able to render them all.
I wish these games had some options that let me choose which resolution I want to play on and download resources just for that resolution.
It's huge because studios don't optimize anymore
I would agree that most studios dont optimize well, however i still remember how small elden rings download was compared to how sprawling the game world ended up being. It was mind numbing every time the map would double in size with each new area, then to find there was even an underside to the map.... it just was perfect.
How do you imagine optimizing image and video assets for 4K+ screens?
Make them optional lmao. I dont have a 4k screen, havent ever had one, and wont buy one for a very long time. Why am i storing these assets i will never use?
That's a good idea, but not always viable. Most content delivery systems don't support optional assets. Also it is impossible to know in advance what do you need. Before the game is launched, it doesn't know that you don't have a 4K screen.
And storage prices are so low today, why do you even bother? Just buy an 8 TB drive or two and forget about it.
There are MANY games from half a decade ago + that just have 4k textures as an additional free dlc, or a setting to download them in game, definitely easy to support by the multi dollar company behind COD
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Steam or whatever launcher could still ask the resolution I want to use before it starts downloading. If the player changes their mind, then they can download higher resolution assets later.
Diablo 2 back in the day would ask which resolution I want to play on in its installer.
Jpegxl. Also most of the filesize is gonna be the direct draw surface files .DDS, which are GPU decompressable meaning they're about 25 times bigger than something properly compressed like .jxl, and that's just with lossless compression. I tried writing a script for a few games to compress them using this and it made them massively smaller but also takes a while to decompress so there's an intermediate that needs to be found (which I'm looking into).
The game is probably using DirectStorage, they can't use JpegXL.
Probably the same way modders have been doing it for decades when bringing older games up to modern standards.
Modders rarely bring crisp textures which will look good on 4K. I haven't seen anything myself.
I don't think I have seen anything of note from AAA developers either. I don't play every single game that comes out though and mostly focus on things easy to get back into when work keeps me off games for several weeks.
There is a likelyhood that the games I have played weren't made with 4k in mind even if the game can display at the resolution though.
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.
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
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?
Platform specific asset optimisations are completely automated these days.
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.
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
you can't write 200 GB of code unless you're GPT. Those files are all needlessly high quality models and textures, environments, etc. 
Yeah, but games a fraction of its size has better textures...
It's not that
No it is. We’re talking different types of quality. There’s subjective quality, which would be appearance, art style, direction, cohesion. You can make something high quality with fairly low detail meshes and textures.
Then there’s quality in the sense of fidelity. You could decimate a mesh and reduce the amount of surfaces on it by an order of magnitude, make it much smaller, faster to render, etc. and have it almost imperceptibly different from the original mesh. Same thing with textures and audio.
Then there are other optimisations, like cutting a mesh you’ll only ever see from one side in half, so instead of rendering an entire high-rise building, you’re basically rendering a cutout.
Doing this takes precision and time though, but it’s worth it because it makes the game run much better, and the asset smaller, at no cost to the visual fidelity, assuming the player doesn’t go out of bounds and views the asset from a side it wasn’t meant to be viewed.
Modern hardware and rendering techniques have gotten so good we can basically forego this though. Deep Learning Super Sampling was initially suggested as a way for lower performance hardware to run games better, but what we’ve ended up with is developers taking shortcuts, not optimising their games, and rendering them on lower resolutions while having DLSS take care of up scaling and improving the image quality.
You can have really high fidelity textures, meshes, sound, and VFX, that takes up a tonne of space, while still looking/sounding/feeling rubbish.
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.
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.
Cool, I'll just continue to not buy it
The games aren’t even worth a fraction of the space they demand, in my humble opinion. They’re more frustration and dedication than fun.
At this point, are all the previous COD included ? Wth
Kind of.
“Modern Warfare 3 is almost here,” Activision begins its post detailing the release and file sizes. “In preparation, we would like to provide an update on file sizes which are larger than last year.” The publisher explains that the larger sizes are “due to the increased amount of content available” on launch day, such as the highly anticipated open-world Zombies and items from previous games like Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone’s maps.
Willing to bet that the game size decreases when streaming gets better.
I hadn’t played CoD since Advanced warfare and I only probably put 5 hours into that game (skipped PS4 got it on PC)
I got myself PS5 for Christmas last year and literally could only fit 5 game on my hard drive. And that was with only installing the multiplayer for CoD MW2 on it. Do game developers just expect me to buy a M2 drive that costs the same amount as the console just to be able to store my collection on my console?
To be honest there is to many distractions with modern CoD. I actually still like the core gameplay but I don’t give a damn about battle pass, weapon xp, or loot drops. But being bombarded with that crap is really underwhelming. I really wish we could just go back to the days of just picking the game mode, and playing the game.
Are the ones that work for consoles that much more expensive than the ones for pc? For pc you can get 1TB the highest quality brands of m.2 for less than 100 dollars now. And 2TB of the okayest quality brands for a little over 100 dollars.
Same prices for PS5, they’re just being dramatic. Xbox series storage upgrades are criminally expensive, but they explicitly said they have a PS5…
What sad losers are still purchasing/playing CoD titles in 2023?
Taste is subjective. One man's trash is another man's treasure.
And sometimes trash is just trash.
Tell that to the kids buying asset flips 🤣🤣🤣
If it's out there, someone is into it.
One man's turd is still a turd.
And sometimes mindless shooting is fun.
I have replayed pretty much every COD game (only singleplayer since multiplayer costs money and sucks) and it's actually pretty fun when you don't want to think much.