Re: World of Warcraft used to be under 50 GB install

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:05:05 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Praetor Mandrake <horchata12839@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

It's currently 150+.  Why don't they just make it a terabyte and no one
can fit it on their comp?

>
You _don't_ have a multi-terabyte drive?
>
What, you think it's 2010 or something?
>
>
Current System:  2TB SSD + 16TB of Spinning Rust
>
Hell I even have a 1TB USB Stick.
>
Xocyll

In fairness, a lot of laptops (and even some computers) are /still/
shipping with hard-drives* less than 1TB, and I'm always surprised at
how many people use ordinary laptops --not even overpriced gaming
laptops, but just regular 'designed mostly for office work' laptops--
as their primary gaming platform. Space for games on these machines is
at a premium, and dedicating 100+GB to a single title can be /very/
annoying.


Worse, expansion of those platforms can be difficult.** Sure, you can
use external drives but those are usually slower, and then you got a
dangly bit hanging off the side. Not something you want in a laptop,
usually.


Even some desktops ship with less than a terabyte, and while expansion
is usually easier there its still extra cost and complexity. The
complaint isn't entirely unjustified.



That said, given the age and size of the "World of Warcraft" world (a
game which has seen ten major expansions), it's not unexpected result
either. It's A LOT of data and it has to be stored somewhere. Worse in
my opinion is a game like "Metro Exodus" (80GB) or "Mechwarrior 5
Clans" (95GB), whose gameworlds are miniscule compared to World of
Warcraft but demand nearly the same amount of storage space.

But that's just the state of things these days. We demand huge vistas
with high-fidelity sound and visuals, and that requires a lot of data.
While its fun --and not entirely inaccurate-- to bitch about how
developers aren't optimizing their games anymore, there's still a
limit to how small a footprint you can squeeze a game into. There
/are/ games with smaller storage requirements, but they come at a cost
to the game's visuals or scale.



TL;DR: Yes, games use a lot of disk-space but that's a result of the
size and scope of their worlds and I'm not really upset at these
requirements. Bitch at your OEM for not providing you with enough
storage space instead. ;-)




Side note: my entire DOS-Games collection -literally thousands of
games- comes in at just about 4 "World of Warcrafts"







* whether solid-state or spinning rust, they're all hard-disk drives
to me ;-)
** The asshole who said, "hey, let's solder the storage directly onto
the motherboard" needs to be tarred and feathered