> but there's no way a 60GB+ game today would ever fit on, say, a DVD, at the same level of fidelity while maintaining the same player experience.

I mean, you could make a modern open-world game where all the textures are procedurally generated from set formulae, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger .

It might even load quickly, if the texture generation algorithms were themselves parallelized as compute shaders.

But it'd be a 100% different approach to an art pipeline, one where you can't just throw industry artists/designers at the problem of "adding content" to your world, but instead have to essentially hire mathematicians (sort of like Pixar does when they're building something new.) Costly!