Ah, yes. The “let’s bloat our game size to bully other games off your SSD so you’ll be reluctant to ever uninstall it, because reinstalling it would be a big pain, that way you’ll play it indefinitely and give us extra money in micro transactions” strategy.
Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy to make people play the game, it’s that efficient code costs more, and the bloat doesn’t effect their sales enough to pay coders to make it efficient
you can’t write 200 GB of code unless you’re GPT. Those files are all needlessly high quality models and textures, environments, etc.
Yeah, but games a fraction of its size has better textures…
It’s not that
No it is. We’re talking different types of quality. There’s subjective quality, which would be appearance, art style, direction, cohesion. You can make something high quality with fairly low detail meshes and textures.
Then there’s quality in the sense of fidelity. You could decimate a mesh and reduce the amount of surfaces on it by an order of magnitude, make it much smaller, faster to render, etc. and have it almost imperceptibly different from the original mesh. Same thing with textures and audio.
Then there are other optimisations, like cutting a mesh you’ll only ever see from one side in half, so instead of rendering an entire high-rise building, you’re basically rendering a cutout.
Doing this takes precision and time though, but it’s worth it because it makes the game run much better, and the asset smaller, at no cost to the visual fidelity, assuming the player doesn’t go out of bounds and views the asset from a side it wasn’t meant to be viewed.
Modern hardware and rendering techniques have gotten so good we can basically forego this though. Deep Learning Super Sampling was initially suggested as a way for lower performance hardware to run games better, but what we’ve ended up with is developers taking shortcuts, not optimising their games, and rendering them on lower resolutions while having DLSS take care of up scaling and improving the image quality.
You can have really high fidelity textures, meshes, sound, and VFX, that takes up a tonne of space, while still looking/sounding/feeling rubbish.
Are they just leaving their textures uncompressed for the performance advantage that would offer? It’s pretty much common practice now to just compress them and have the game engine decompress them on the fly, but that does have a significant performance cost.
I could see it making a difference if they are going for “twitch” shooter. But I don’t know enough about shooters to know if that is the gameplay style cod is going for, or if that is even a term for shooters people use anymore.
They are probably using DirectStorage to increase game performance, that means that the only compression available to them is GDEFLATE. And that’s not the most efficient algorithm for photo like images as used in textures.