Re: HumbleChoice May 2024

On Tue, 11 Jun 2024, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 09:13:22 +0200, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
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On 5/7/2024 8:24 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
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* Steel Rising
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1283400/Steelrising/
    In essence: Dark Souls in revolutionary France with a
    bit of steampunk thrown in. Beautiful map design; somewhat
    shoddy gameplay mechanics and pacing. Still, there's
    something oddly appealing about this one. I think I need to
    give it a chance.

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I was actually looking quite forward to sampling this one, it seemed
like a nice kind of game in an interesting setting.
I have now installed it.
It's playable.
But Jesus Christ why is this game 60gb? There is no reason why a game
like that should take that amount of storage space. In my opinion this
looks worse than e.g. Assassin's Creed 2 from 15 years ago. And I don't
mean the resolution, the whole design looks artificial and lazy in parts.
Frankly it looks like a game from the mid-2000s for which someone just
upscaled the graphics.
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Also it doesn't even seem to have any other voice acting besides
English, which sounds like a lost opportunity for a game set in France.
And the dialogue keeps dropping in French words to show that yes, we are
in France, just to translate them right afterwards anyway.
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In other words: not impressed so far.
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I can't speak specifically for Steel Rising, but in general publishers
have gotten sloppy when it comes to the size of their games. Multiple
language versions are installed, even after if you specify your chosen
language. Textures are uncompressed. Videos are huge.
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Twenty years ago, corporations had incentive to cut back on how much
data was shoved into a game; after all, not only did they have to pay
for the delivery medium (floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc.) but
console manufacturers put hard limits on how much storage space was
available. And even when the platform had a hard-drive, storage costs
were so high that games with too-big a data footprint wouldn't sell.
"Ultima VII", released in 1992, was lambasted for requiring 20+MB of
disk-space (it was only because it was otherwise such a stellar game
from such a renowned franchise that it sold anyway)!
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But these days, it's the consumer who pays for the transport medium
(bandwidth) and disks are so cheap, why not expect them to dedicate
100GB+ to a single-game? What, they can't just buy a 2TB drive? What
sort of gamer are they?!? Anyway, optimization is costly, and if a
customer has to download a separate language pack if they decide to
switch languages, surely you can't expect the publishers to pay for
the customer support that might cause? So just dump everything onto
the user's hard-drive. It's not like gamers won't keep buying new
games.
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Optimization is costly, but I am a bit tired of having to install what used to be more than my HD would be (in fact my first HD was 300mb) just to play a mediocre game that plain could have been done better.
By the way, my machine is rather new, but it has only half the HD space my previous garbage can of a system had. Because we are all switching to SSD now...