My favorite instance of unnecessary file bloat was due to a bug. The Microsoft Store and Epic Games versions of Fallout 3 would download the full game once for every single translation the game supported, with every translation in its own subfolder. A nine gig game ended up taking over forty gigs of hard drive space.
And then there’s shit like ARK: Survival Evolved, a ten year old game that requires the better part of a terabyte with all the DLC. Infuriatingly they did eventually reduce the install size, but only for the terrible UE5 port that nobody asked for.
And on the opposite end of things, Helldivers 2 reduced their install size by over a hundred gigs (down to around twenty total) by simply removing duplicate data from the game files, if anyone was wondering how expensive that HDD seek time optimization I mentioned was in disk space.
With that HDD optimization, it should really be an option, like a separate program that comes with the game that restructures the data for use with an HDD. The game could even detect when it would be useful by profiling load times and offering to do that (along with a warning about how much more disk space it will use) for users who don’t even think about that.
As someone who has put money and thought into optimizing my system, it’s annoying to have to still deal with shit intended for those who haven’t. I wonder what the portion of people still gaming from HDDs is at this point. SSDs have been the standard (in my mind) for a long time, even if it’s just a SATA one.
My favorite instance of unnecessary file bloat was due to a bug. The Microsoft Store and Epic Games versions of Fallout 3 would download the full game once for every single translation the game supported, with every translation in its own subfolder. A nine gig game ended up taking over forty gigs of hard drive space.
And then there’s shit like ARK: Survival Evolved, a ten year old game that requires the better part of a terabyte with all the DLC. Infuriatingly they did eventually reduce the install size, but only for the terrible UE5 port that nobody asked for.
And on the opposite end of things, Helldivers 2 reduced their install size by over a hundred gigs (down to around twenty total) by simply removing duplicate data from the game files, if anyone was wondering how expensive that HDD seek time optimization I mentioned was in disk space.
With that HDD optimization, it should really be an option, like a separate program that comes with the game that restructures the data for use with an HDD. The game could even detect when it would be useful by profiling load times and offering to do that (along with a warning about how much more disk space it will use) for users who don’t even think about that.
As someone who has put money and thought into optimizing my system, it’s annoying to have to still deal with shit intended for those who haven’t. I wonder what the portion of people still gaming from HDDs is at this point. SSDs have been the standard (in my mind) for a long time, even if it’s just a SATA one.