News Star Citizen likely to have a 100GB client

At least if the game turns out to be a lemon (unlikely) they will be known for breaking a few records.
Not that i know what the largest game client is, or what the highest funding for a game are.

 

Every time I hear more things like this about Star Citizen I become more worried. I can't help but feel that it's going to suffer from "George Lucasfication", where the details in everything are there, but everything feels off. An example of this would be when they were showing off the FPS gameplay last year. They went on about how amazing and immersive it was being able to see the breath of your character on the helmet visor, yet the animations were some of the worst and most second rate I've ever seen. It just feels like such a weird alpha state to be in, where some big things are awaiting massive overhauls, but people are putting in meaningless details like that.

 

The inevitable consequence of increasingly powerful graphics cards, increasingly high monitor resolutions and increasingly high expectations from game players. My Elders Scrolls Online client already runs to 41.6 GBs, with much still to come if Zenimax deliver.

PS, today's favourite word is: increasingly.

 

Though I haven't played the game yet, I know what you mean. I think part of the problem is the game tries to be a little too much of everything. It's overwhelming to new users, it's probably overwhelming to developers, and it makes the game much harder to polish.

I ended up getting the game as part of the Never Settle bundle, but I still haven't played it yet. I'm waiting for it to be more completed. I've still got a handful of other games I haven't played yet anyway.

It annoys me a bit that the game is so huge. I'm PRETTY sure anyone with a PC capable of playing this game will have a CPU that can handle some high compression. Compression noticeably reduces load time anyway.

 

Wow! this is the first game that has made me reconsider getting it based on client size alone.

 

I might soon consider an hot-swappable HDD bay with one SSD per game


(Sorry for the el-cheapo MsPaint mockup)

 

I've thought of doing the same thing, but I'd rather not spend ~$100 of SSD space for 1 game.

Personally, I'd rather get a Blu-ray burner and put all of the low-demand files (like music or video cinematics) on a disc, which often end up being the largest files in games and the least updated. Then I'd symlink the files so the game knows where to look. But, I'd only do this if I were tight on disk space because that is a bit inconvenient.

 

If true. Ouch.

 

Or y'know, they'll make up some excuse like Titanfall did with their 50GB (or whatever it was, I don't remember) of audio files, saying that "dual core CPUs can't handle compressed audio" or "gives better quality".

 

The size may drop soon, as they're switching to a procedural damage generation system, which has reduced the size of their test ship files by 75%.

 

I find it sort of ridiculous this is news when the game is like, two years from launch? Surely it's a case of seeing what actually arrives at launch and then having kittens about download caps?

 

Its like listening to a group of grumpy grannies wining about the price of HDDs in their younger days and those pesky youths with their modern SSDs. OK so it is 100Gb. And? We dont buy the latest CPUs, GPUs and SSDs to sit their empty and unused. I would rather have a fantastic game with a near endless selection of ships and customisations that pushes my PC to the limit than a made for XBox game that runs at 480p and renders up and has graphics textures that would make a PC game from 10 years ago look good.

Bring it on.

 

There was this guy, called Bill Gates, who said 640kB RAM will be enough for whatever.
World keeps on turning guys.

 

A 1TB drive is $50. Allow preloading over a period of months for people with metered connections and problem solved. If you want it on a SSD then that's a level of performance that's going to cost, and you should already realize that gaming on a SSD is bound to end up an expensive endeavor. At no time in history has the size of games quit increasing over time, thanks to technical progress.

 

will all this heaving textures and elements not strain most pc's? so even if it comes out the line, "yeah, but can it play crysis?!" will change to, "yeah, but can it play Star Citizen?!"

 

shoud be: so even if Star Citizen launches, the line...

 

... Adobe Acrobat reader: 604MB ... for a PDF reader! I think dev don't care about HDD space or memory usage.

 

Actually, he didn't.

Back on topic: 100GB doesn't automatically mean it's awesome, it means it's bloated and inefficient.

 

You're completely missing the point - just because people have the hardware to play the game, it doesn't mean we want to waste it all. That's like buying a truck with 500HP, but the entire chassis is made of lead, so you've just lost 300HP just to carry it. But by your logic, that's ok, because the reason the truck was bought was purely because it was powerful.

The point is, if the game is 100GB, something is very wrong with the developer's focus on efficiency. Sure, I've got 100GB to spare, but I shouldn't HAVE to spare it for 1 game if the exact same results can achieved easily in half that (or less) space without any significant loss.

Developers in general are getting lazy. The new gen consoles are perfectly capable of playing games just as detailed as, for example, Star Citizen. But companies don't leave enough time for games to get polished, and now the consoles are compared directly to PC hardware, which isn't a fair assessment. I miss the Gamecube or Xbox (original) days, when games were unbelievably refined and didn't need constant patching.