I just bought DOOM: The Dark Ages for Xbox Series X and the moment I stuck the disc into my console, it says the game needs an update which is 77.5GB.

I have shit fucking internet in my area. That large of a file will take 15+ days to download. Do physical discs no longer contain game data these days?

I bought the disc hoping I could just stick the disc in and play it, not wait 15+ days.

Edit; I was corrected in a reply on mistake on the game on dislike matter... but I am not editing out what I saidso the persons reply still makes full sense..


Ya most game disk's don't hold anywhere near the full games anymore most games are often way too big to fit on the disks anymore or you'd be swapping disks like crazy .. Still when they do have the whole game on it in the console era of them having internet without a add-on ..then its a case of stuff like day one patchs that can be just as big or even bigger then the game itself ..

There is even cases from the prior generation of consoles where some disks didn't actually have the game on it but just had the code pretty much and the disk was used as a authentication key or whatever ..

But ya I can't say for Doom the dark ages or most any game on console anymore for that matter as I have not been on console for ages but I do keep abit of tabs on console matters

Microsoft is known for not including the full game in their physical releases.

That's certainly not true; BluRay holds 100GB and most games are still less than this. Also you wouldn't swap discs, you install the game like you do on a computer. Even if the game needed two discs, you'd swap exactly once and never again, unless you deleted and re-installed the game. You realize that nobody has used DVDs for ages and consoles come with SSDs, right? You can't run games directly from disc even if you wanted to (and it would be horribly slow if you could).

Its simple:
They don't want to put the whole data on disks.
Why?

DRM.
The DRMed design of the modern physical releases is also simple:
A considerable amount of the data must be downloaded because this is how they confirm the disk was bough or the image of the disk was legally acquired. Everything is tied to the internet nowadays... which is terrible, I really feel for the OP.

Guy bought the game, after a hard day of work just wanted to enjoy the gamne which should be fully on the physical media he bought, only to be surprised with a 200 hours download screen.

Also, the solution for slow down is simple: Installation, like they used to do back in the day with PSP disks, for example.
I understand it would not be so fast to install 100gbs of data, but it clearly is better than having to download the data which should be present in the disk in the first place...

Right. The idea I responded to about "games don't fit and you'd be swapping disks" was just plain incorrect. Theoretically most games would fit if they wanted to, but aside from that console games are also not really finished on release anymore just like computer games and require patches. If you really need 100% self-contained physical games with no downloading, unfortunately modern consoles aren't generally going to work very well.

Physical media of today can be hit and miss. Buying blindly can be a recipe for disaster.

First thank you for being civil and such on the correction there .. Secondly last I used and checked on Blue ray amount it can hold was back when it was just a standard Blue ray not all the varies variants and that was back when the max one could hold was about 60GBs of data so I checked with your statement and ya they can hold now alot more depending on the Blue Ray format in question

So my bad for the mistake there but companies/studio's have been using the ''games can't completely fix on a disk '' reasoning even in the 8th generation of console gaming(which fyi currently we are in the ninth generation of consoles) which the 8th generation apparently was after the 100gb Blue rays came out and they was still making and even now coming out with games that can still fit on that size of a disk.. So my bad there granted when game companies push that and one like me who never really used blue ray disks for ages atleast as storage media let alone people clueless to even how much a blue ray can hold its understandable what companies pushed on games and disks size factor would be viewed as actually factual .. in this case because of data limits in storage media

And yes while they download from the disk the consoles still are still needed to play the gams on consol last I checked .. but I could be wrong here now too on the disk factor if that changed

And I am easily aware consoles have drives now

Thing is the state of game releases these days is so half-done and poorly tested that the idea of a working one-install on physical media isn't really viable any more.

It generally depends on whether the release is a day-one or much, much later after the game has matured or not whether you can expect a game to be stable and fully playable.

A day-one release of any game on a console should have been a thoroughly tested and been offered as a complete install on the disc, but we don't live in that shouldland anymore.

This is part of the reason consoles are pushing to go disc-less. There's just very little point any more releasing on physical when a massive critical-patch update is immediately required anyway.

😂 🫂
like a spoon on a chain and a soup in a closed container far away
I'm sorry for them. Someone has to.

Only semi-related but when Skyrim came out I bought the physical version because I read somewhere that it was DRM free if you bought physical. It truly was the main reason I decided to buy on day 1, because I wanted to support DRM free launches. I don't know who said but it but they were completely wrong, it was just a box with a steam code.

Somebody owes me an apology

This is when I entered an internal dispute with steampowered.com. I bought a Witcher2 in Biedronka as a souvenir from Poland, and when I came back to the UK, I found that not only does it need a client and online connection, but I also need to be in the "mother country" to play it. I said: what!? : )

Games on discs/offline installers are like music on cassettes, you can take it to the cosmos and play.
Everything else is a prevarication with long hands.

This is the reason, sadly. Developers could easily put the whole game onto physical media, blue rays, whatever, if they wanted to. Here's the thing - a patch is supposed to be just that: a patch. I.e. a small file to tweak some portion of the code that needs to be updated to fix some minor bugs.

If the entire game needs to be re-downloaded, then frankly it wasn't ready to be released in the first place. (that or the devs are being extremely lazy)

That is mostly a Microsoft specific thing.
Edit: Completely forgot about the whole Switch 2's code in a box bs.

Every physical PS4/5 game I bought has all the data on the disc, sadly day 1 patches are a thing and quite a few games lack polish or features without patches, but they're still playable, except for DLC which obviously requires a specific patch. :D

Ubisoft and EA games are an exception, they require an internet connection to activate the license, luckily for me I have no interest in most of their titles. For the Playstation this is incorrect, most titles have all the data on the disc and are playable.
This might be true for the XBox or Switch, but I don't have those consoles and couldn't tell if that is the case.