As an example, Horizon Forbidden West that tops out at nearly 90 gigs. This is insane. Pretty movie scenes make up most of the game. These games are almost impossible to port to PC, I'll be much older when the PC version comes out and even older when and if it comes to GOG.

That kind of size is nothing new as of 2022.

There are much older games that as big and/or way bigger than that, like Red Dead Redemption 2 for example.

So are you looking for, merely complaining about, or pontificateing upon this?

Because I can remember when Final Fantasy 9 looked pretty great.

I'll happily take a cut in textures and scenes in which my computer can't keep up on anyways.

So, when I saw the title, I figured this was a recommendation thread. I'll go ahead and make the recommendations.

The Order 1886 (This game is not so big by today's standards, I think it's about 30 GB.)
I'm going to advise avoiding the multiplayer of Call of Duty Vanguard and instead enjoy the always online single-player mode. It should have only the barest minimum of gameplay and the cutscenes had a decent amount of effort put into the looks.

Those are the main examples I can think of, enjoy.

Wrong. The cutscenes are mostly realtime rendered in-game; the game is 90GB because that's what happens when you have large open-world games with a lot of content. Borderlands 3, for example, is >100GB...there's a "movies" folder that has a few pre-rendered intros and a number of animated clips used for stuff in the game, which totals about 0.5GB. So 99.5% of the 100GB is textures/audio/models/animations/level data, because that's just what it takes for that sort of game. You can't magically make it any smaller, unless you want to remove content or degrade the quality significantly. Maybe think about just dealing with it? Instead of this tiresome "Back in MY day, our games didn't need any more than 32KB and we LIKED it!" schtick.

Still does look great imo.

That's what big corpos don't understand: art and photorealism are not strictly related.
A lot of games made with pinnacle tech look unremarkable, while few pixels can look way better than them.

Art style is also incredibly important to prevent a game looking dated.

I think a great example is Legend of Zelda Wind Waker. Originally for the Gamecube, a remaster came out for Wii U but the game doesnt look that different. There are improvements like clearer lines but the original gamecube version honestly doesnt look that bad.

I also still think many games on the SNES look great because the art style is iconic and remaking them with an updated art style makes them look worse.

back in the day we had our games in 96K !! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

You can still download it from the wayback machine internet archive.

18:08

PS4 versions of HFW does have pre-rendered versions of some of the scenes. There are some YT analyses on it. They did it because it was released across console generations, and there's a significant performance difference between PS4 and PS5 that they wanted to preserve. PS5 is entirely realtime rendered.

But yeah a lot of the size is from texturing for 4K rendering. And HFW does look great. I look forward to eventually playing it. (I'm instead doing a re-play of HZD. Yes, a re-play -- I rarely do that. The game was that fun.)

To OP:

This isn't anything new. Phantasmagoria in the 90s was the prototypical example of an FMV game, and there were others. Such FMV-adventure games are still made, like Kaigen Games' 3 titles on GOG (Simulacra, 2, Dr Who). I suspect those games might be much smaller if they tried to go with realtime rendering rather than entirely FMV (And in Simulacra 2's case, it's 4K video at that), but they're designed for low-spec but still looking good, and made as films.

As for difficulty in porting, Windows is getting some of the memory access things that the new generation of consoles have that reduce their asset streaming load times. Aside from that, I don't see any reasons for porting difficulties. Size is about the assets and not the difficulty in porting. This isn't like ye olden days where data and assets were baked together and developing for console was an entirely different process than for PC.

If you're arguing that you prefer "gameplay heavy" vs "cutscene/story heavy" games, well, that's a division in games. There are huge differences in preferences. Some people really prefer their games to focus as much as possible on mechanics/action/gameplay, others want their games to focus primarily on story. And then the whole spectrum in between. Different games and genres do it differently. Some people even complain about "too many lines of text" in games that don't have cut-scenes but scrolling boxes for quest NPCs. This is a personal preference with no real answer.

I couldn't agree more with this. When your style is distinctive, your game never gets old (at least, graphically).

There's also the difference between mechanics and action.

The issue I have is that the genre that I most like the gameplay of, RPGs, happens to be one that seems to be filled with story focused games, which I don't like. I want more RPGs that actually let me experience RPG gameplay, not just to watch the games, so when RPGs got story heavy, it really felt like the partial death of the genre, in a sense.

There's also the issue of gameplay being gated by story; to get to the good gameplay, I *have* to watch the story. (Some players, of course, may complain of the reverse.) I'm thinking that games should offer options to skip the story, or better yet, take Even the Ocean's approach of offering separate Story and Gauntlet modes. (Does that studio's newest game, Sephonie, provide similar options?)

This is probably small in comparison, but if the game is internally anything like HZD, they probably ship a bunch of shaders compiled for the PS4 and PS5 with the game. (The PC version of HZD, when started for the first time, needs to compile a bunch of shaders, which can take a while (depending on your CPU); at least, from what I've heard, the game tells you that's what it's doing.)

That applies to non-graphical styles as well. When your gameplay style is distinctive, your game never gets old (at least, not gameplay-wise). The same could be said of other aspects of the game, like music, and, of course, story.

(Worth noting that I actually rank music as being more important than story when it comes to video games.)

PCXS5, or something like that, is supposed to be a pretty good imulator. Is that pirating? If used, how would you get game upgrades, disc or digital? Wasn't there lots of trouble with the disc version when installing to the PS5?

Anyhow, isn't the cost of PS5 in the U.S.A. less than $500?

come on GOG, get the PC version, PLEASE!