Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself

Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by zorked on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:23PM (#18452975)

Among others there's the issue that patching may be a seek-heavy operation. Downloading a 40GB file over a fiber connection is much faster than merging 8GB of new textures into a 32G file on a console that has a HDD.

When downloading from a fiber connection to a PS4 HDD the bottleneck is likely the HDD's speed. To merge a file you would need to at least read it and write it again, which is at least twice as slow as simply downloading it. Alternatively you can pay the cost by seeking constantly instead (like a texture per file), which may be even slower and probably sucks at runtime.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by mejari on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @02:46PM (#18453183)

Only a quarter of the US even has the option of fiber, much less actually have it. It's silly to use ideal fiber transfer rates as the argument for downloading whole-hog vs more targeted patching, and I doubt it's the reasoning they use.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by Tsubasachan on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:36PM (#18454226)

And don't forget that Sony and Microsoft need the infrastructure in place for handling millions of people patching the game at the same time...

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by tracker1 on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:56PM (#18453859)

If it's one 32G file, there's already something wrong...

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