Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by willis936 on Saturday September 10, 2022 @08:44AM
(#32790110)
Star fox and Monster Hunter are different kinds of games. RPGs and dungeon crawlers have asked for dozens of hours of grinding for a very long time.
However, it is much more pleasurable and less of a grind when fighting monsters made up of a million 3D triangles as opposed to one made up of 100 2D squares.
Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by est31 on Saturday September 10, 2022 @04:20PM
(#32794287)
Often times designers copy the same resource many times to build a level/game. Maybe they modify the resource a little bit, but it's still mostly a copy. There is no deduplication, the n copies get stored n times. Admittedly, it's also done to improve load times, but making piracy harder is I think another benefit for the game creators.
Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by Gigachad on Saturday September 10, 2022 @06:25PM
(#32795048)
This was supposedly done to improve loads on hard drives by keeping resources physically close.
Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by mananaysiempre on Saturday September 10, 2022 @09:00AM
(#32790221)
I seem to remember that some old program was in fact purposefully bloated (by including a copy of ... something(?) encrypted with a random key, i.e. essentially a chunk random data, on the installation CD) to make it harder to transfer via the slow connections of the time.
(I wanted to make a snarky irrelevant note but now I want to remember what it was.)
Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by popmatrix on Saturday September 10, 2022 @02:15PM
(#32793099)
I don't believe the intention was padding the size, given the main shipping format was disks rather than downloads, but perhaps you're thinking of this?
https://kotaku.com/when-south-park-got-an-ea-sports-game-pul...
Re:The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion
by mananaysiempre on Saturday September 10, 2022 @06:40PM
(#32795139)
No, and probably not this either (which cites both piracy and padding to the higher-bandwidth edge of the CD).
https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/13/crash-bandicoot...
This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.
Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].
[0] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=9035 [1] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=83169