I own a paperweight I mean a PS5, and got a nice new batch of games for Xmas on disc and on the digital sale (Timesplitters 1, 2 and Future Perfect for less than 5 bucks together, among others, hell ya). So naturally, I need to download and load things for them. Not to worry, I have an external hard drive that’s a terabyte big…
Except that PS5 games only launch from the system itself, not an external memory unit (PS4 games can though). And now both are stuffed full.
So I gotta shill out almost **200 fuckin dollars for a 2 terabyte hard drive and perform surgery on my system to get it in.
All because Jedi Fallen Order and M1K are disgustingly bloated, and I hate having to delete and reinstall shit if I want to play things.
Now ? LOL lmao even , it's been that way ever since the PS3 era
People were complaining about FF13 file size in gamefaqs forums
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/53667757
How the fuck is it over twice the size???
From what I remember higher res fmvs and audio (as in uncompressed probs), which like, maybe 2% of the population could see and hear, and less would care.
ps3 runs at higher resolution (720p) and has uncompressed 1080p cutscene videos. 360 runs at 576p and has compressed 720p cutscenes.
OH AND I’M SURE THE DIFFERENCE IS SUPER NOTICEABLE
Considering that FFXIII is one of the best looking games of that console generation, it kind of is? If you were still playing on an old TV, it probably didn’t make much of a difference, but if you were using HDMI with a newer TV at the time, you could probably tell a difference.
It just seems like you’d either only notice if they were side by side or you’d get used to it after, like, 20 minutes.
If you've played FFXIII you'd know it's actually very noticeable, Xbox One retrocompatibility actually patches so that it's using the PS3 videos because the 360 videos are filled with compression artifacts
And is still not as pristine as the PS3 videos!
Got a lot better though
Probably not, though in 360s case regardless noticeable or not, it had to be done because the 360 games ran on dvds vs the ps3 using bluray. So options were either compress it to 3-4 dvds, or use like 6-8 dvds for most games that needed just the 1 on ps3
Yes
Yes, it is, actually.
XIII has a lot of pre-rendered (in-engine) cutscenes which are indistinguishable from realtime cutscenes on PS3.
On 360 they look (and sound) like absolute shit.
If you can't notice the difference between 576p/720p and 720p/1080p you might have eye problems. Knee-jerk hating better graphics is just stupidity.
Considering the launch PS3 had a storage size of 60GB yeah that’s absurd.
FF13 on PS3 didn't require an install to run. It was 38GB on the disc and it wasn't available digitally on PS3.
Which I guess was for the best because the PS3 didn't just launch with a 60GB model, there was also a 20GB model.
It's so interesting reading stuff about games on the internet because most of the time it's pretty clearly just people who have never actually played the game or used the system complaining. I wonder what compels it. Complaining about filesize in the 360 gen was only really a thing for PC users or 360 users who had to put up with multiple discs; the PS3 never really suffered unless the game required an install and even then I don't remember it being a big issue.
The only issue big file sizes really caused on PS3 for me were the install times for the games where it was mandatory. But that was less about the file size and more because the read/write speed between bluerays and the HDD was pathetic.
It's funny because I had the opposite argument with a guy where he was saying "Man I wish we were back in the ps3 days when you could just put a disc in the system and immediately start playing" and you just have no real way to talk with that person because he's either lying to himself or ignorant. I remember making fun of Gran Turismo players because they had excessive loading/install problems.
The PS3 load times were rough, man. There were obviously some games that ran fine out of the box, but most either required a substantial install or ran like shit (or sometimes both tbh). In terms of pure user experience, it's my least favoruite home console that I've owned.
I remember the Uncharted games being really rough on boot. The games were pretty seamless as they ran but they had to preload a shit load of assets with each boot to make that possible and it was brutal.
Oh, and GTA 5 actually took straight up 10 minutes.
FF13 doesn't install itself on the HDD, it's actually kind of a wonder why it's such a problem for someone that Square used that much of a BD's space
Does this example really bother anyone? It wasn't available digitally and installing was optional. The size of the game mattered to no one really.
I do remember it being an issue when they ported the game to PC though, because then it *was* all digital and it wasn't optional either. I think after you installed it you could safely delete the voice/cutscene files from other languages, but you still had to install them in the first place.
Here's a different example. When Drakengard 3 released the Japanese VOs as a DLC for the international version, it was over 10GB. I remember thinking it was absolutely insane back then.
My "i know it but I cant prove it yet" theory is that devs are doing this on purpose. Uncompressed games that take up massive amounts of space on your memory prevents you from having multiple games on your system, meaning you have to pick and choose what to keep. This forces you into continuing to play their game, or at least have it be one of the few games you've got on it, so they can monopolize your time, especially if it is games with MTX.
That and companies are being cheap about compression, I dont need to prove that though. Hell divers 2 on pc went from 150gbs to like 20 gbs.
That was due to deliberate asset duplication on PC in the hopes of speeding up load times on hdd's. It turned out when they actually tested it the benefit was minimal so they just cut that stuff out and brought it into parity with consoles.
The helldivers debacle does make me wonder if there is some sort of standard where devs think that a game with a size above X gb would be played directly from an hdd.
I can tell you as one of the apparent freaks who does this, HDDs are very cheap for their size, and despite how slow they are I use them for big games all the time. It honestly doesn't matter for me in 90% of cases, because I'm not a big multiplayer gamer. I put Rivals and such on my NVME, though, that was just unplayable.
The Helldiver devs directly stated their had gotten their assumption from an industry standard. I don't know the specifics of what that standard were exactly, but it sounds like the sort of thing that you're describing.
Less that and more thinking about access times and fragmentation optimization for data stored on disc.
I'm still on vacation so I don't have access to the docs, but IIRC Sony's documentation for creating patches for PS4 games talks about how the delta system will write duplicate data to the spinning rust in the PS4 because that does improve loading times. And I trust Sony's documentation. (Also I think depending on the size of the delta it'll either rewrite in place or it'll move some data elsewhere on the hard drive then write the patched data in place, might have that second one backwards though).
As Arrowhead said, it might not be that much of an improvement (though IIRC in their case it's because most of the loading time isn't assets but generating the map which doesn't require as much disc access) but an improvement is an improvement.
First of all: that's an hypothesis, a theory would have some actual evidence of you being in the right
Second: it's legit not a thing, if you're on PC you can try to do stuff like forcibly compressing games, this at times works wonderfully, you just do it and the game works like butter, generally on older games with a PC that would be running them at 2000 FPS, but most of the time you realize why they kept it uncompressed: stutter city
Third: there's actually a great example from last year: part of Monster Hunter Wilds absolute shit performance on PC comes from compressed assets, turns out that since PCs lack the dedicated decompression hardware that modern consoles have, having very compressed assets will just end up shitting on the game's performance and a decompression mod has been regularly used as a way to win back some performance
Fourth: console manufacturers are very stingy on letting devs do too much with disc management with patches so that one game doesn't put itself above others when it comes to performance. This is limiting if devs want patches that keep the size of the game under control, they'd need to, well, make you download the entire game again, the alternative is to let the game keep growing in size with each patch, which is what most people prefer since they don't want to be downloading 50/60 GB each time the devs want to change a weapon to do 5 less damage
Five: Some devs do try to keep manageable enough, using a recent example, over the course of the last year Overwatch kept growing in size, it was getting quite close to 80GB, and a lot of it came from data used for a season that's never going to be seen again. So what the devs do once it's beginning to get noticeably bigger than what's expected from it, they release a "rebase patch", this gets rid of all the data that's not being used but still present, lowers the game size notably (game is now at 60 GB) and limits the big game downloads to once a year, which is overall reasonable. Other examples of games that do this include Fortnite, Warframe, Apex Legends, Sea of Thieves and even CoD, all try to keep file sizes as reasonable as they can without asking you to get a new PC to handle decompression
Sixth: Helldivers 2 could reduce the size that much due to 2 things:
now that graphics is plateauing maybe hardware manufacturers should consider working on adding this to PCs.
This is isn't a scientific paper, it's a casual conversation. Words can have more than one meaning, in fact most of them do, even technical terms. Or do you throw the Origin of Species at people's heads when they say someone evolved as person? Or ask them for physics equations when they say someone is "full of energy"?
It’s the only logical explanation for why Call of Duty is like 350 GB. Or rather, of the two logical explanations, it’s arguably the more charitable assumption because the alternative is gross incompetence.
These studios are crunched to the bone to churn out these games on a yearly basis, and they're often just tacked onto the same launcher that they used years ago. The logical explanation is gross incompetence.
I don't think it's really gross incompetence so much as it's no longer a metric or consideration anymore.
Compression, and optimization are both things that take time and resources that teams are told they have less of, and are perpetually in crunch.
It's definitely something that affects consumers, and it's been a complaint among enthusiasts for years, but it's not something that most mainstream consumers realize or have been able to rally behind (compared to some of her buzzwords like SBMM, lol).
Could always be a bit of both columns!
The year is 2026, your xbox only has room for one ball game and one gun game to be installed at any time
Don't worry, they're working on Gunball: The Endgame for 2027. We just have to hold on. I hear it's going to free for the first hour!
I actually heard its more the latter than the former, but kind of deliberately. See CoD suffers from some of the eprst optimization in the industry as a result of them being churned out every 2 years, specifically when it comes to load times and cpu usage. So they deliberately leave these games decompressed to try and cheat out better load times and reduce crashing.
I think it's more likely the publishers are forcing the devs to do it that way. Most Japanese games seem to compress their files just fine, in my experience.
A game being too large just makes me not want to download it in the first place though
I've been having this same head canon back when Warzone kept getting more and more bloated
This was in fact a talking point on the podcast in the past, I think Pat brought it up to enlighten Woolie how CoD Warzone is doing it to NIMBY other games off your hard drive because most people are more likely to FOMO on Warzone.
I can promise we're not.
Source: it was revealed to me in jenkins and perforce
Going to download a game and finding out it's under 30gb feels like winning the fucking lottery.
I couldn't believe it when Borderlands 4 dropped and it was under 30GB. I was over here preparing to delete a bunch of shit cause I expected it to be well over 100 like Borderlands 3 and most other AAA titles, then nah it's actually one of the smallest games on my console
Are you sure? The Steam page says ''100 storage space''? if it is under 30gb then i look forward to it, part of why i dont play 3 that much is that it runs like shit and it's CHUNKY on my SSD. Same with SF6 actually, still playing SFV cause of that.
I can't speak for Steam, especially when there have been absolutely massive size differences between console and PC in the past like Helldivers 2 as other people mentioned here, but on PS5 it says the current size is at 29.55 GB
Looking at my library now, it's 80gb on Steam.
Ah, same size as vanilla 3 I believe then.
I always forget they're so big, get excited to play a new game then instantly turn sour when I realise it's nearly 100gb.
While we're on the subject it's fucking ridiculous that Yakuza 0 is 17gb and the "remaster" is nearly 90 GIGABYTES and adds virtually nothing.
I really like boomer shooters on the PS5 (I've gotten used to the controller after primarily playing mouse and keyboard) and it's always funny seeing download sizes of under a gig or 2 compared to literally everything else on my drive.
Man that digital sale was so refreshing since so many retro games were super small…until i decided to buy the MK trilogy because it was super discounted
Whats the verdict on MK trilogy?
Bought Blue Prince the other day and sighed in relief when I realized it take less than 10 minutes to download.
Not defending the lack of storage on PS5 or the opimisation of modern games, but I did have this issue a few months back and installed an NvME drive (I just went with a 1TB). If you're worried about the process of installing the drive it's honestly really simple. Once you take the plastic covers off the slot is right on top.
I did something similar with my old 360 lite, so I’m not too worried. Just that it’s way more thin and fragile looking than the deck of cards shaped box I did for the 360
I've swapped out hundreds of those things at my old job, they're genuinely painless to work with - just plug it in and lightly screw it down to secure it. Couldn't be easier.
Really they're probably more durable than the old HDD you're talking about since they dont have disk platters to worry about scratching up in them. Can't speak for every single model out there of course, but you almost have to try to break those suckers in my experience. If you can handle a smart phone without breaking it, you have nothing to worry about.
Brilliant. It’s mainly the anxiety of handling expensive tech (and space, and money) that prevents me from PC building as well.
That’s generally the sacrifice that gets made, the more a game gets compressed the more load gets placed on the CPU/GPU/Memory to decompress in real time. Considering the SSD is generally the most user replaceable part on consoles and PCs and also the cheapest part these days, it’s the better trade off rather than having to increase the spec on other hardware.
Compression isn’t this free thing, the more you compress anything, the more of a hit on performance you’re gonna take elsewhere.
I experienced this first hand with Monster Hunter Wilds. The compression is confirmed to be hogging CPU resources on an already CPU bottlenecked game. A mod that decompresses the assets was proven to improve the smoothness of the game by magnitudes.
An article about God of War Ragnarok being ported to PC mentions this very topic as well. They traded off disk space for performance since not all PC users have an nvme drive unlike the PS5.
I personally don't mind the space of most games take up, as I only play a couple at a time anyway and unsintall afterwards.
Same, in this day and age it’s pretty much expected that you don’t keep everything installed forever. You cycle out what you’re not playing and in most people’s cases, that’s like 2 or 3 games and power users might have like 7.
Glad my taste is primarily visual novels and indie games, the last three games I've played were all under 1gb.
Also, since my Internet gets very wonky, it's another issue when I need to wait a day or so to play something I got to download. I wanted to play Halo 1, but I would have to download the whole Master Chief collection and I don't want to download all those games for one thing. Fallout 76 is now about 100 GB, so I probably won't play that again. And don't even get me started on trying to get into Payday 2 or Rockay City with their 90GB sizes....
You don't actually have to download all of MCC and can just pick what games you want(i.e never downloading Halo 4)
This is true on PC, but I believe the MCC on Xbox is Halo 1-4 mandatory install since that's how it released originally.
It’s not that way on Xbox anymore and hasn’t been for a while.
I remember it was that way when I did it on the Xbox PC app a ways back, but it could have changed since then.
Glad to be wrong then.
Game compression has been bad since the ps360 era. Also I can see why those games dont run on the hardrive you claim to have its an hdd. It would take too long to load in assests its the reason you need an ssd.
Current gen games need SSDs to properly run which is why they told everyone that they wouldn’t work running off normal hard drives.
My fools hope is that AI gobbling up all the past, present, and future hardware is going to force a game optimization renaissance. Consumers and developers aren't going to be able to just throw higher specs are a problem and make it go away for the foreseeable future.
Uncompressed assets is optimization, you don't want more Monster Hunter Wilds trying to save 30GB of space in exchange for half your FPS and the game turning into stutter city, you only compress when you know the target hardware can handle it or the game is designed in such a way you download everything in RAM with one big loading screen, but that limits what kind of games can be done
Game development cycles nowadays are longer than this current bubble is likely to be. This current hardware apocalypse may be 2 or 3 years, it's impossible to say for sure. Some games are in dev for 5+.
Maybe the most egregious shit I’ve seen is the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection from 2024, which contains both the original Battlefront games, is 50 fucking gigs! The originals (that you can still buy on Steam btw) are combined not only cheaper, but take up maybe 10 gigs total, and have far greater mods.
The Classic Collection takes up more space than EA’s Battlefront from 2015, ffs!
Not being able to use external drives has nothing to do with bloat or storage size in the PS5. The reason it only runs from internal storage is because of storage speeds.
External drives can not physically deliver the SSD speeds required to make these games run within Sony's specifications. So they are not supported.
Essentially, internal SSDs are plugged into a data controller directly. External ones however basically first need to convert their data to USB, the USB then going through the cable to the system's USB, that then gets convert back to a data signal. Each of these steps introduces latency and hence can reduce the data transmission rate by a lot. The maximum USB data rate is also well below the SATA data transmission rate.
Naturally, preventing pirated games from being run on the system also has something to do with it.
Space Marine 2 with the 4K textures DLC is 190 GB on PC ;(
How many games do you need downloaded at any given time?
Currently on my hard drive: Helldivers 2, Nioh 2, Nightrein & Elden Ring, and a ton of others
Like, a bunch of storage intensive games.
And I'm using less than half of my storage with a totally mundane ps5.
My Internet slow as hell so I need to download any game I might want to play at least 3 days in advance, so deleting games causes me to take psychic damage
Put simply, after PT, the 360 store closing and stuff like MK9 getting delisted, I don’t trust digital storefronts to keep things up all the time in case of “well I’ll just redownload it later”. I will hold on to and hoard that shit.
Well yeah, not deleting games will do numbers on your hard drive space.
I don’t want to set aside 3 hours to reinstall RDR2, Death Stranding or something else before I can actually play the damn thing.
I definitely do not think you have to worry about two of the biggest AAA games ever released being delisted tbh
And I suppose you’ll have to draw the line somewhere if you’re stuck between the trap of buying a bigger SSD or complaining about storage size.
I am buying a bigger SSD, and complaining about storage size getting ridiculous. That’s a perfectly valid thing to do, as I would like more storage anyways, but it’s still an annoying thing.
And I’ve got those two on disc, it just still takes forever and a day, and I’d like to just “stick a disc in and go”.
Im sorry bud but this is a hoarder mentality. You dont have to let these things define you. But also, cant you just offload the games to other drives then put them back on your main one when needed.
Do people not regularly delete games they're finished with?
I have an HDD I tend to store PS5 games I'm not currently playing on, because it's a lot quicker to transfer it to the SSD than it is to redownload it.
Why?
A big thing of the PS360 era, in some small part at least, was people making games with decent file sizes so you could just install them and leave them on your system(This is why we had XBLA). Not all of us have blazing fast internet speed, either, a game like BG3 takes me an entire day to download, and I got a friend in the UK who'd probably take a lot longer.
(Not to mention you could argue that such poor optimization is just wasteful in terms of energy expenditure. Which, that's a stretch but..)
Corpos should actually work on proper game compression instead of pushing the problem onto the consumer/
Uncompressing game files is a big performance hit so if they did compress those files you'd just be bitching about that instead
Downloading games to your system wasn't a big thing at the start of that gen and even by the end of it games weren't always available digitally. Games were smaller size (generally) in the 360 gen because games being 720p was often the best case scenario rather than the expectation. It feels like you either completely forgot what that gen was like or know about it from youtube videos. Like the 360 didn't even have a hard drive/onboard memory by default; you needed a higher tier sku just to have a small amount of memory.
Frankly, everything having cloud saves has made it so easy to just decide to delete digital games knowing I can just go back to them super easily. Took awhile to get into that headspace but once I got there, everything felt easier.
Rise of the Ronin does not deserve to be over 100 gigs, especially for a game that looks like a PS4 game.
I want to send a sincere "fuck off" to Baldur's Gate 3, the motherfucker who is 142GB.
You ain't that guy, pal. You ain't that guy.
No no, you have to love the game that doesn't have a custom map creator, proper modding tools, or a GMing mode(Nevermind the whole mess of working with WotC and just staying quiet when WotC was doing MONSTROUSLY shitty things to try and monopolize the tabletop scene) while also being 150 bloody GB because they have funny and witty characters and meme-worthy dialogue. You're not allowed to criticize it, I'm sorry, but thems the rules.
(Seriously, I'm not saying BG3 is a bad game but people are crazy if they think it's even remotely close to being a top 5 -or even 10- CRPG. It's missing important core features that were literally standard 20+ years ago. Let alone the horrible file optimization for a game that REALLY isn't that big and REALLY isn't that good looking. Nevermind the piss poor character customization- Which to be fair kinda plagues CRPGs in general but STILL HOW ARE WE HAVING THIS PROBLEM WITH GAMES BASED ON TABLETOPS- Ok I'm sorry I had to rant about all that.)
THAT BEING SAID, if anyone is looking for a CRPG that's multiplayer and has custom campaign support(Along with actually having more than one campaign), look at Solasta(Which has a sequel coming out soon). Also only the host(I think, maybe it's just anyone in the game?) needs the DLC for everyone in the group to use it, which is pretty rad.
Complaining about lack of QOL features is one thing, but complaining about not including several substantial actual pieces of content not remotely within the purview of the original release is kind of dumb. It's a little dumber because "Don't release tools that replace our official resources for making maps and running campaigns" was almost certainly a contractual obligation, and it's even dumber because the game's toolkit has made custom maps possible for over a year.
You must REALLY not understand contracts if you think "Why didn't this still-under-contract licensee contractor just shit talk their licensor?" is a serious suggestion
Weirdly enough I never really had an issue with this. Guess I got lucky that most of the games I play are on the smaller side, or it's since I only really have a couple active games at any given time with no issue of uninstalling the moment I'm done. Mind you, not a defense of game sizes. They are kinda bs at times.
The price is horrible, but don't have to open the PS5 completely, at most you have to take off the white plastic panel at the top to get to the slot.
But unfortunately it due to the PS5 having the storage built in the motherboard.
Does the PS5 not allow you to use external drives as cold storage OP? Where you can store the games on an external drive and then copy them to the internal SSD when you're ready to play? The Xbox Series and Steam do.
The PS5 will let you store ps4 and PS5 games in external storage but you can only play ps4 games on external storage through USB. you have to move the PS5 game into internal storage or the m.2 SSD to be able to play the game .
It's crazy, I love mortal Kombat but there is no way it needs to be over 100g of space. I relate to this too much man. It's why I struggle to complete games because I legit have to uninstall the big games I'm playing if I want to try any thing else. God forbid my ass wants to play rdr2 and diablo cause that don't fit.
I got my SO a PS5 for Christmas, she installed Fortnite and Mortal Kombat 1, there goes almost half the space. I heard about this, game size and the OS saving like 200GB so you don't really get the size advertised, and paid more for the 1TB version and not the 800Gb one. Especially with all the storage prices rising.
Dead by Daylight also go from like <10Gb to 60Gb from PS4 to PS5 version, are the 4k textures taking that much more space? 1k to 4k should be x4 at most?
Meanwhile the demo for Dragon Quest VII is under 3GB and I'm like "HOW???"
Small slice of a small scale remake of a 3DS remake of a PS1 game.
How is baldur's gate 3 over 100 gigs?
Also, it was during this I found out how barebones the UI for the PS5 is
I was expecting to be able to move games into folders or something like you could do on the PS3 (iirc) to properly organize them
Nope, it’s instead a jumbled fucking mess
You sorta can though? https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/how-to-make-folders-on-ps5
It's nowhere near as good as it was on the older systems, but it's something at least.
I mainly get physical games, so it's a useful way to keep track of my digital games.
You can kinda do that on the PS5 though. It has some feature called Gamelists that are basically just folders, but the big downside is that unlike the PS4's folders you can't put your game lists on the main screen UI, the gamelists only show up in the Game Library under the Your Collection tab. I have a game list for my backlog, one for pre orders, and one for the games I'm grabbing trophies for. You just hover over any game, press start, then Add to Gamelist then it'll put the games in a folder at the top of your library.
I miss the PS4's folders on the main screen plus the toggle to make the scrolling game UI go from 10 to Unlimited though. Plus the USB music player from PS4 to PS5 is such a massive downgrade that'll never be fixed cause they want you using Spotify or whatever instead.
Yeah I found those and they’re so underwhelming. I had a very nice organizational system with my PS4 that I can’t replicate at all with the 5.
And this is supposed to be more advanced
This is why Nintendo is still winning. They understand compression and do it well
“Preform surgery” you mean pop open the removable panel and take a screw driver to the Philips head that was meant to be opened?