Witcher 3 at 4k? Crap, I'm jealous... :) Yeah, I'm in no hurry for FO4. It looks pretty impressive in the trailers and various videos on Youtube etc. but I've got like 50 RPGs here to play through that are 50-200 hours each so I'm not experiencing any dearth of RPG play for some time to come. :) They'll eventually put out a FO4 Super-Holy-Shit-Mega-Edition that includes the 10000 DLC in one collection, then I'll wait until it's available on Bundlestars for $10 or something, or on GOG for that matter. :)

The image shows the PS4 version. Not surprised it has such a large install size on console, since they'll refrain from compressing the updated textures because of the console's lack of processing power. PC will soon face this too, unless devs and engines start optimizing for more than 2 cores. We already had some games larger than 45GB I think (ie Wolfenstein and Titanfall).

They probably will in the next few years as Vulkan and DirectX 12 uptake becomes more common, as both APIs make it immensely easier to take more full advantage of multiple CPU cores and multiple GPUs.

...that AAA publishers are secretly also major investors in manufacturers of SSDs and hard drives.

Yes, hopefully. 2 cores is a 90s standard and its well beyond time we moved past that. Thinking of how all the other stuff changed through the years, like HDDs that have storage sizes in GB and not MB and similarly with RAM, or how ''average'' screen resolutions got bigger, annually increasing amounts of VRAM on GPUs, how floppies and now DVDs died and all that, it seems to me that prioritizing dual core is nothing but holding on to the (redundant part of the) past.

00s, but yeah. The graphics APIs never caught up to the hardware in over a decade now so it's about time. ;) Here's something to think about... Remember playing games from a single 1.44MB floppy disk? Now consider how many of those same disks it would take to hold a game like The Witcher 3, and it's only been approximately 20-25 years! That's around 30,000-35,000 floppy disks! LOL

I was too young to use them in their heyday..........and that explains my mistake about dual cores as well. I've even heard someone people say /conspiracy INTEL IS IN ON IT /conspiracy seeing how long we've been using dual cores.

The first dual-CPU PC released in 1989. It is Compaq SystemPro.

However, two or more CPUs in one PC is very rare in 1990s.

Hyper-threading for x86 appeared in 2002, two or more cores in one x86 CPU comes later.

I guess 99.99% PC in 1990s only have one CPU and one core.

If nothing else, this will encourage the proliferation of SSD drives. I look forward to the day when I don't have to listen to 7,200 RPM of death-clicks.

I'll have to say this sounds accurate. I know of someone who had a SMP motherboard and it was a powerful system. A millionaire (Who coincidentally has more than once got mad at a laptop and then shot it with a shotgun...), we went to his place for dinner once, played Mechwarrior games on his computer. Hmmm those were the days...

While SMP (Symmetrical Multi Processor) was possible it wasn't too well supported, not even by Windows. Linux and Windows NT were the first ones to really support them I think.

Of course this was a time when 500Mh machines were top of the line too, and 32MB was a lot, since each meg originally cost something like $50 per meg until the price suddenly fell in like 1996.

Maybe puplishers should start thinking outside (or rather inside :P) the box and do something crazy like release the game when they are finished only and then on 2-3 blu-rays or USB which do not require and bigger online updates but a few MBs here and there. This could be done in stores or malls or something. I know, sounds crazy :P

With GB sizes like that I'd rather have a big regular 2TB or more HDD next to a SSD instead of just a SSD (unless I became filthy rich and can affort TB sized SSDs :) ).

Is it still common in games to use FMV for cutscenes? To me it seemed ever since PS3/XBox360, it became more common to use the game engine for cutscenes (instead of prerendered stuff or even live actors), and I would have expected that to decrease game sizes somewhat... but apparently not.

I presume merely increasing game graphics resolution in itself does not increase game sizes (e.g. System Shock 2 didn't become bigger even if I ran its graphics in ultra-high resolutions), but the related things like more detailed polygon models, more detailed textures etc. do that.

About the larger game worlds especially in open world games (which of course COD is not part of I guess), that's the part I am wondering, is there some practical limit? Let's say that in Witcher 3 it took CDPR 3 years to create 50 detailed cities. Then one could think that ok, creating 500 similarly detailed cities would take 30 years, so I guess we won't be seeing such games because they'd simply take too long (and be too costly) to create. Of course game creation tools get better over time but the thinking is still there.

I presume we can't expect game worlds just to become ever-increasingly bigger and more detailed (hence games becoming bigger just because of that), but there will be some practical (fuzzy) limit? Games like No Man's Land use some tricks to create lots of worlds/planets (procedurally?), but I presume those don't increase game install sizes similarly.

This also. I presume there must be some practical limit, e.g. you can't expect even an AAA development team to create e.g. a trillion detailed and unique textures for just one game.

I guess Quantum Break is kind of a special case in these ever-expanding games, as it is apparently a full TV series put into the clothes of a game? So I guess it is mainly the sheer amount of HD (and 4K?) video content that increases its size.

It better have a photorealistic 4K HDR UHD Bagillion MegaPixel render of Kit Harrington in game or else that is just a waste of space.

SSDs buck-per-gigabyte ratio must become much better though, before people will buy them (big enough to install games like COD:IW). After all, when someone complains that he has run out of space for Galaxy games on C:, it seems the problem always is they have some teeny-weeny SSD drive as their C: drive, then they want to install their games on the slower, but much bigger, HDD D: drive.

I'm still waiting for big SSD prices to come down a lot, before buying my first SSD. I'm not against the idea of having a much faster hard drive, but extra room is far more important to me at the moment than the waiting time for a game to load.