Remember when games were insanely optimized because the resources available were extremely limited?
Devs have gotten lazy with taking full advantage of the hardware they’re developing for…
Granted, the technology is always advancing, probably faster than people can get accustomed to now. Especially with harsh deadlines and horrid work environments. But AAA companies have no problem unloading half-baked schlock, and blaming your hardware
Ironically calling devs lazy is the true lazy opinion, no one working in the industry is lazy. You know this. You can use better words to describe what you mean rather than saying that the overworked and underpaid engineers are “lazy”
Whenever there is a thing like this, you can always pointing back to a couple obvious curlprits cause it’s almost always that case.
- There is that decision making group think it is fine and just push through instead of listening to their own people.(look at unity runtime fee a while ago.)
- There is simply enough time to trim it cause the trimming part keep getting pushed back because priority.(by the same group above)
- You’d be surprised that efficiency didn’t really scale up with amount of people involved in a project, nor how experienced the people has been in the industry. Because the tech is a moving target every year.
- The brain bleeding from inadequate pay or inadequate management is astonishing even for fairly well managed company. Your can have people doing literal jack shit and only pay lip service that like to put their finger into stuff to justify their cost, and when people actually couldn’t give another fuck and decides to leave now you have some muddy place/project to work with.
- C-suites looking for getting acquired/spring board higher rather than making actual good stuff. Their performance evaluation aren’t tie to the quality of product.
Gaming industry are not that special where the whole group of people can just go to work and scroll all day.
I wouldn’t say this is lazy devs, I would say it’s tight deadlines and overwork that don’t allow time for optimisation.
Remember, it’s almost never the devs, and it’s almost always the executives
As a dev, though not a game dev, I’ll wager good money this is not the outcome you’d find on a survey of the game devs involved. It’s the kind of thing that devs will suggest when asked “okay let’s say we need to make this next iteration as cheaply as possible now, what could we do?” But most of the devs likely take pride in their craft and if given the time would definitely want to optimize their game.
TLDR:
This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone. (Note: as part of our ongoing optimization efforts, your final installation size will be actually smaller than the combined previous Call of Duty experiences).”
I would understand a 100 or so GB but 230 for something like Mw3 sounds a bit bloated.
Even GTA 5 is smaller and has probably more nooks and crannies than the first map of Mw3.
Game size are not determine by the size of the map most of the time but the amount of assets you kept inside the shipping build. Usually the size of the files ranked are textures, audios(especially if you support multiple language), cinematic (pre-rendered), animation.
edit: MooseBoys reminds me how much cosmetics we have now in our games.
edit2: If game engine allows artist to paint over game world and save painted virtual textures tiles for location decoration purpose, texture will scale with game map size, see my response below using BG3 as example.
Will be interesting what GTA6 will bring to the table. The visual fidelity will probably surpass and be as big as RDR2.
If GTA6 doesnt surpass MW3 I feel like it has no place to be bigger. Even if MW3 supports multi-dub, cinematics, etc.
I have 6 4tb nvme’s so a non issue for me, bring it on!
“This is due to the increased amount of content available day one, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from Modern Warfare 2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone."
That is not an explanation.
What a joke