Activision has moved to explain the enormous file sizes Call of Duty fans can expect to hit their hard-drives with the launch of Modern Warfare 3 this month.
“This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone."
Remember when games were insanely optimized because the resources available were extremely limited?
Devs have gotten lazy with taking full advantage of the hardware they’re developing for…
Granted, the technology is always advancing, probably faster than people can get accustomed to now. Especially with harsh deadlines and horrid work environments. But AAA companies have no problem unloading half-baked schlock, and blaming your hardware
Ironically calling devs lazy is the true lazy opinion, no one working in the industry is lazy. You know this. You can use better words to describe what you mean rather than saying that the overworked and underpaid engineers are “lazy”
Whenever there is a thing like this, you can always pointing back to a couple obvious curlprits cause it’s almost always that case.
There is that decision making group think it is fine and just push through instead of listening to their own people.(look at unity runtime fee a while ago.)
There is simply enough time to trim it cause the trimming part keep getting pushed back because priority.(by the same group above)
You’d be surprised that efficiency didn’t really scale up with amount of people involved in a project, nor how experienced the people has been in the industry. Because the tech is a moving target every year.
The brain bleeding from inadequate pay or inadequate management is astonishing even for fairly well managed company. Your can have people doing literal jack shit and only pay lip service that like to put their finger into stuff to justify their cost, and when people actually couldn’t give another fuck and decides to leave now you have some muddy place/project to work with.
C-suites looking for getting acquired/spring board higher rather than making actual good stuff. Their performance evaluation aren’t tie to the quality of product.
Gaming industry are not that special where the whole group of people can just go to work and scroll all day.
As a dev, though not a game dev, I’ll wager good money this is not the outcome you’d find on a survey of the game devs involved. It’s the kind of thing that devs will suggest when asked “okay let’s say we need to make this next iteration as cheaply as possible now, what could we do?” But most of the devs likely take pride in their craft and if given the time would definitely want to optimize their game.
This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone. (Note: as part of our ongoing optimization efforts, your final installation size will be actually smaller than the combined previous Call of Duty experiences).”
I would understand a 100 or so GB but 230 for something like Mw3 sounds a bit bloated.
Even GTA 5 is smaller and has probably more nooks and crannies than the first map of Mw3.
Game size are not determine by the size of the map most of the time but the amount of assets you kept inside the shipping build. Usually the size of the files ranked are textures, audios(especially if you support multiple language), cinematic (pre-rendered), animation.
edit: MooseBoys reminds me how much cosmetics we have now in our games.
edit2: If game engine allows artist to paint over game world and save painted virtual textures tiles for location decoration purpose, texture will scale with game map size, see my response below using BG3 as example.
Will be interesting what GTA6 will bring to the table. The visual fidelity will probably surpass and be as big as RDR2.
If GTA6 doesnt surpass MW3 I feel like it has no place to be bigger. Even if MW3 supports multi-dub, cinematics, etc.
Actually, my statement might be a bit wrong regarding map size once I think more carefully. Modern trend that allows artist to directly paint on game world could create really heavy virtual texture assets that scale with size of the world. Games that approach “unique” look or feeling per area without making you feel they reuse or have tileable textures all over the place tends to use this as you can just stream in textures that mask over tileable and make it looks really decorated for that area. They basically trade file size with artist freedom.
One example is BG3, where the VirtualTextures_*.pak have 18 files, 72GB. While normal asset textures has only 4 pak files and aobut 13GB.
You’re right – end of the title had “16GB”; shouldn’t have just grabbed the first listing on Amazon that came up in a search for 1TB. But there are listings for 1TB flash USB drives between $10 and $20 – you could legitimately ship games on them.
Now that’s the ultimate end game: Just ship a new console for every new game.
MS, Sony and Nintendo just ship the base motherboard + DRM platform but game devs ship the CPU+GPU appropriate to play the game at 4K30 (obviously with dynamic scaling)
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I have 6 4tb nvme’s so a non issue for me, bring it on!
I could spare 230 GBs of HDD space but asking for that much SSD space is asking for too much.
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tldr: unoptimization and lazy devs
file compression is now dlc and requires prestige level 2
“This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone."
That is not an explanation.
The finals is 5.2GB
What a joke
235GB is ridiculous
And I thought Starfield was big, holy shit…
Honestly why? Why does it need to be that big? I think that’s the most memory I’ve seen a game take up, ever.
Yeah no thanks I’ll pass. If a game is gonna take a quarter of a terabyte it needs to at least be a decent game
Remember when games were insanely optimized because the resources available were extremely limited?
Devs have gotten lazy with taking full advantage of the hardware they’re developing for…
Granted, the technology is always advancing, probably faster than people can get accustomed to now. Especially with harsh deadlines and horrid work environments. But AAA companies have no problem unloading half-baked schlock, and blaming your hardware
I wouldn’t say this is lazy devs, I would say it’s tight deadlines and overwork that don’t allow time for optimisation.
Remember, it’s almost never the devs, and it’s almost always the executives
I agree, the tight deadlines make them copy paste and progressively increase the assets size without any eventual cut down on unused code or assets.
Ironically calling devs lazy is the true lazy opinion, no one working in the industry is lazy. You know this. You can use better words to describe what you mean rather than saying that the overworked and underpaid engineers are “lazy”
Whenever there is a thing like this, you can always pointing back to a couple obvious curlprits cause it’s almost always that case.
Gaming industry are not that special where the whole group of people can just go to work and scroll all day.
As a dev, though not a game dev, I’ll wager good money this is not the outcome you’d find on a survey of the game devs involved. It’s the kind of thing that devs will suggest when asked “okay let’s say we need to make this next iteration as cheaply as possible now, what could we do?” But most of the devs likely take pride in their craft and if given the time would definitely want to optimize their game.
You mean projects no longer factor in the time or prioritise this kind of optimisation, right?
The next MW will be coded in JavaScript lol
TLDR:
This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone. (Note: as part of our ongoing optimization efforts, your final installation size will be actually smaller than the combined previous Call of Duty experiences).”
I would understand a 100 or so GB but 230 for something like Mw3 sounds a bit bloated.
Even GTA 5 is smaller and has probably more nooks and crannies than the first map of Mw3.
Game size are not determine by the size of the map most of the time but the amount of assets you kept inside the shipping build. Usually the size of the files ranked are textures, audios(especially if you support multiple language), cinematic (pre-rendered), animation.
edit: MooseBoys reminds me how much cosmetics we have now in our games.
edit2: If game engine allows artist to paint over game world and save painted virtual textures tiles for location decoration purpose, texture will scale with game map size, see my response below using BG3 as example.
Textures have been the biggest size contributor by far for a while.
With so many cosmetics in our world I think you are right. XD
Will be interesting what GTA6 will bring to the table. The visual fidelity will probably surpass and be as big as RDR2.
If GTA6 doesnt surpass MW3 I feel like it has no place to be bigger. Even if MW3 supports multi-dub, cinematics, etc.
Actually, my statement might be a bit wrong regarding map size once I think more carefully. Modern trend that allows artist to directly paint on game world could create really heavy virtual texture assets that scale with size of the world. Games that approach “unique” look or feeling per area without making you feel they reuse or have tileable textures all over the place tends to use this as you can just stream in textures that mask over tileable and make it looks really decorated for that area. They basically trade file size with artist freedom.
One example is BG3, where the VirtualTextures_*.pak have 18 files, 72GB. While normal asset textures has only 4 pak files and aobut 13GB.
Sounds like something marketing would write lol
Because a dev would write a technical explanation which would be translated by game journalists into “my boss sucks”
Yeah certainly would have been written by them.
@[email protected] put this bit in the description!
The next Call of Duty will be the price of a console and will come preinstalled on a dedicated hard drive.
Tiger Electronics handhelds, but it’s a Switch Lite with box-art printed on the front.
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deleted by creator
Are they really available for that price now?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Are they really available for that price now?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
looks more closely
You’re right – end of the title had “16GB”; shouldn’t have just grabbed the first listing on Amazon that came up in a search for 1TB. But there are listings for 1TB flash USB drives between $10 and $20 – you could legitimately ship games on them.
Better than buying the disc but still having to download 200gb when you get home.
Those two are not mutually exclusive
You will be shipped MW3 on an M.2 cartridge.
It’ll be it’s own plug in console
Now that’s the ultimate end game: Just ship a new console for every new game.
MS, Sony and Nintendo just ship the base motherboard + DRM platform but game devs ship the CPU+GPU appropriate to play the game at 4K30 (obviously with dynamic scaling)
Maybe drop bundling warzone.