Meanwhile, Deep Rock Galactic: solid mechanics, good community, worth so many hours of fun, no microtransactions, no FOMO for their season rewards, and stylized low poly graphics that make every cave gorgeous to look at: 3gb and only $30
I don't understand what happened with this game...
My bothers and I played it quite early on and it was fine. We didn't stick with it or anything. Just another spot to play together. No one was talking about it or anything.
Then like a year later everyone is going nuts about it. We see it pop-up everywhere.
It's a game that gets quite repetitive. And I say that as someone who has played it regularly since Early Access.
I play it, have tons of fun until it's all the same again and again, I forget about it, devs release new free stuff, I try the new stuff... repeat.
I can see some people giving up on the game for good but it's a game best played occasionally.
Oh, and the online community is surprisingly friendly and non-toxic for the most part.
For me I got into it because I wanted a game that bridged mine and a friend's interests. I like mining things and she likes shooting things. So I'm driller main she's gunner main and it works great. I've stuck with it and been so excited for it because the devs are phenomenal. They work with the community, don't try and screw us every chance they get, the game is just fun and the devs seem like they have fun too. It is so refreshing having a game that isn't hot garbage. I also actually really like multiplayer sometimes but almost always that means dealing with hordes of super toxic players. That just doesn't happen with DRG almost everyone is so friendly and most people who see me doing absolute nonsense join in on it instead of telling me to play better. I tell everyone about DRG because of how rare it is to find a game with good devs and good multiplayer.
Hey if you want to hit me up when you try it I'll show you the ropes. Be warned though I play driller almost exclusively and am basically a semi-sentient warcrime
It might not be their goal because large files have performance ramifications, but if they can they save on cpu by taking space.
Plus they know their players don't play their entire catalog and stick to specific franchises because games are so fucking expensive, so now they make you have to gamble if you're going to buy this other game an wipe your console to just stick with what's installed. For live service games this is definitely profitable.
Isn't it funny how Nvidia wants you to use upscaling so badly for Raytracing to perform as well as they market it to, but then Raytracing itself needs more VRAM to run properly in the first place?
Nothing about their products makes any technical sense anymore, it really is just one giant middle finger at this point
Online services like games consoles and the likes of Steam / Epic should really allow games to be bundled such that users can choose to only install the "recommended" content rather than everything - the textures for their display & graphics card and multimedia and other assets for their region & localization. If a game is level based they could even grab it the first time it is used, rather than all up front. I bet in a lot of cases it would shave 30% off the download size.
Another source of bloat would be duplicate content - a hold over from hard disks where the cost of seeking an asset meant game data files would hold duplicates of assets wherever they were needed to load-in which increases bloat. In the days of SSDs, that should no longer be necessary but I bet a lot of games still do it anyway. Publishers just need to decide if they're going to support HDDs or not and if the answer is not, then stop bloating games for no reason.