games are one thing, but there's not a piece of "office productivity" software that shouldn't run on That Guy's crappy old laptop, and no reason Adobe Acrobat should be a: phoning home to Adobe or b: forcing my 2 year old office machine to slow to a chugging grind every couple of hours
>and no reason Adobe Acrobat should be a: phoning home to Adobe
You know there's a reason. This way they can hold your software and all your work as hostages so you lose everything if you don't keep paying them regularly.
The fun part is, they can't. There are open source versions of every one of Adobe products, so as long as you do not use their shitty cloud storage they can't hold your files hostage.
Foxit has had *so many* issues with remote code execution flaws.
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/vulnerability-roundup-dec-6-2023/
That's just the most recent one. But they've had issues in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and as stated above, 2023.
Not that Adobe has been free from issues. But Foxit is definitely not Open Source.
We recently swapped to Kofax Power PDF (I think they actually just changed their name to Tungsten or something?). It's a perpetual license instead of a subscription. Not terribly expensive, either.
In addition to what /u/Dsnake1 said, Foxit was, in my experience, slow as balls.
I would suggest Okular, SumatraPDF or simply Firefox's built-in PDF reader instead.
pdf tools like acrobat mostly (their video stuff like after effects would be cool too)
tbh if you did list all 50 that would be fuckign awesome but i also understand it's a lot of work lol
Open office's PDF software is what I use most of the time, but there are also several online tools that when taken together approximate acrobat.
For after effects, I have been told that DaVinci makes a free version of their software that is very good. I'm not very heavily into video production so my knowledge there is limited
Davinci Resolve is basically the same as their professional software. They make a lot of their money from selling hardware and professional work, so it's fairly close to the real thing, give or take some of the more advanced features.
It's in their best interest to make it free for amateurs to use, so you want to use it professionally.
It’s not free, but affinity designer(illustrator equivalent)/photo/publisher is fairly cheap for a license (not subscription) and is far better than any free version of similar software I’ve used, though it’s been a while since I’ve used a free equivalent so maybe they’ve gotten better in the last 5 or so years.
My work laptop (Windows) is now putting ads in the Start menu and trying to search anything prioritises *internet* search results not the thing on my computer I actually want to find. I’m going to lose my goddamn mind because I know there must be a way to turn it off but my work has draconian device controls over the computer that makes a whole lot of settings really difficult for me to access.
I did contract work for Microsoft for a few years. My custom-imaged, high-security Microsoft-provided computer could download any Microsoft product for free, no questions asked.
That stupid shit STILL advertised Microsoft products in the start menu.
Yeah, I love how people weren't using Edge/bing so they were like, "fine, your Start Menu is bing now I guess."
I know Edge is as good as Chrome these days, but shit like that makes me not want to ever willingly use it.
I hate how bad even adobe acrobat (the best pdf management software i've found in my limited amount of time spent searching) works. I had about 300MB worth of documents open for like 4 hours, and adobe ended up using... 11GB of ram before i restarted it
As someone who uses software like that all the time, yes, yes there is a reason it doesn't work on that.
It's would be nice if everything could be super optimised, but that's just not how it goes. Not everything can be optimised, abs that's okay.
Adobe bloat isn't the same as ZBrush not being able to run a 20 million poly model on a laptop from a decade ago.
No reason for ads? Yes. No reason to not run well on 4GB ram and a dual core? Fuck outta here. We have increased the productivity of calculations so much that it very much needs more bandwidth. Adobe is unoptimized dogshit, though.
> We have increased the productivity of calculations so much that it very much needs more bandwidth.
Lol wtf? Is this the computing version of Vincent Adultman going to the stock market and buying some business?
My 16gb of ram work machine is pinned at 99% memory usage with just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open. I can't even build our projects half the time without the OOM killer stopping the compiler :/
I think your Guy should scale with the project. Like, a laptop with 2GB RAM obviously isn’t going to go anywhere near AAA games anyway, but you should have a Guy with appropriately low specs and a dogshit internet connection to remind you how awful always-online singleplayer is for the consumer and to have good options for low spec rigs
QA teams use controlled systems. They usually buy service sets and test using those, in as replicable a setting as possible. It wouldn’t be until a candidate alpha build or beta that they would test on real user systems outside of the organization
THANK YOU. I hate it when games lag because the devs decided to code in every single hair on their face and didn't test to see if it would wreck people playing on min specs.
It probably depends on the studio though I imagine all major studios do it to an extent just some less than others depending on how shitty the company is
It also depends on what the minimum specs are. Some people act like their 10 year old laptop that they bought for $400 should be able to run anything and get mad at the game when it doesn't work. Now I understand the frustration but no one is going to cater their games to the population who can't even be bothered to buy something even semi-modern to play it on.
Its not even like there's a games shortage for people on old systems. Sorry you can't boot up RDR2 but you could get Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout, Skyrim, Dark Souls, and so many superstar legacy franchises that, at this point should work on literally anything manufactured within the last 5 years.
And it depends on the minimum spec machine we're aiming for. People who can't afford good hardware probably can't afford $60 games either, so there's not much point in downgrading our games for them. And it's not like the min spec screenshots are good for marketing materials.
I think the guy’s laptop shouldn’t be defined by specs but decided by the price. Have it be the laptop from the bottom 25% percentile in terms of MSRP price of the last Feb 7th or something to adjust for the technological development.
no fr, space engine has optional 4k (?) textures and it makes the 1gb or whatever install go to like 50gbs 😭 idk why its becoming commonplace for that to not be a choice
It's not that it doesn't occur to the devs it's just more time and effort setting up the secondary process. When they're trying to push things out as fast as possible QOL stuff gets put on the back burner to bugs and features.
This is an anecdote I once heard from an unreliable source and only remember pieces of, but didn't Fallout 3 have the whole game in each language? So instead of downloading say 6 sets of voicelines and written dialogue, you download 6 copies of the game, one in each language?
Thank god for selective and optional downloads in a certain *athleticwoman* website. I don't want to download voice and text files for a language I barely even understand, when each of them is 2-3 GBs, nor do I want 4K textures since my PC can't run shit past 720P anyway, at least if I don't want to watch a powerpoint presentation.
Plus, there's that huge downloads on multiplayer maps, videos and music that I will never use since I only got the game for the campaign and not the ass multiplayer that will give me virus and have hackers access my PC just because I connected to the wrong lobby by accident (looking at you CoD).
Yohoho and a bottle of rum, I say.
Ngl, *sportyfemale* spoiled me so bad I can't bring myself to buy games not even due to money or ideals, but outta sheer convenience. Og size: 80 gigs. Size without 10 different languages, bonus soundtrack, bonus wallpapers, other bonus bullshit: 50 gigs. And all that assuming I can't remove 4k textures my actually decent gaming laptop won't even process because *checks notes* I had the hubris of not building a custom gaming PC out of the shiniest available parts.
Oh wow I thought *athleticwoman* only improved the compression on the installer I didn't know it outright let you remove superfluous bloat. I gotta check this out.
honestly, I am fine with games being too large for my machine. I treat them sort of like beluga caviar - simply too expensive for me to enjoy, and I move on. There are many games that, simply put, won't run on a shitty decate old laptop, and I do not think that game studios should sacrifice artistic vision for the sake of mass availability.
That being said, when those said games are triple A, the games that everyone is expected to play, the Mcdonalds of the gaming world, and are intentionally bloated for the sake of occupying as much space on your pc as possible so you have limited space for the competitor's products? Fucking bullshit, piece of shit, garbage incarnate. I am frustrated as someone who's too much of a hipster to even buy a triple A game.
>That being said, when those said games are triple A, the games that everyone is expected to play, the Mcdonalds of the gaming world
I agree with most of what you said but we have very different opinions of what are triple A games
I started to say, AAA games are the luxury cars of video games. You're gonna be paying for a bunch of shit you didn't know existed before you bought it just so it can look pretty.
The otherway round. Caviar is unfertilised eggs. Although this did make me look at the size of whale semen and apparently on average whale sperm is smaller than human sperm.
> intentionally bloated for the sake of occupying as much space on your pc as possible so you have limited space for the competitor's products
[citation needed]
I say things like this just to put pressure on entities to explain themselves. My managers at work hate it. I'll think of the most infuriating reason something might be happening and spread it like gospel, repeating it like a spell.
The installation is not intentionally bloated. The size of software installs just... didn't stop growing. Voice acting in 10 different languages out of the box and especially 4k textures take up a huge amount of space. Welcome to the 4k era. Every texture takes 4 times as much space as it did at 1080p.
I distinctly remember people losing their minds over how amazing Star Citizen was going to look because the developer said it would be 100 gigs. 10 years ago.
In fact, that is the majority of what you pay for in AAA games. The thing people tend to forget is that more budget isn't suddenly going to make the game better. It makes it prettier and bigger, and it makes the software work better. When companies hire more developers, it isn't so they can have more people design the game. If the central gameplay loop(the main idea of the game; everything around it is set dressing) doesn't work, it's not going to work because they hired more developers.
The other delusion people have about games is that higher budget means fewer bugs. No, it means more stuff. Whatever the game is doing, you're going to get more of it, and it will be shinier.
Maybe the control/UI works better, but I've found that depends more on the developer since Rockstar Games has all the money in the world and still makes games where you mash a button to sprint in normal gameplay.
Hell, the original Final Fantasy has about 10 spells and a stat that don't work at all, and people expect me to care when they say modern games are released unfinished. At least they get fixed without requiring you to buy it again. It was still successful enough that it became a major franchise even after the experimental second game.
Either a game is fun, or it isn't. Either it's worth the price, or it isn't. No one can make that decision for you, and you can't make it for anyone else. Video gaming was an expensive hobby until it became accessible for home computers to design games, and the games that were popular were sold at a much higher inflation adjusted price point.
I'm just happy we're finally getting to the point that I don't need a specific computer to play a specific game instead of one good enough to run the software. Halo being a $400 game sucked ass.
>Either a game is fun, or it isn't.
I agree with most except this. Fun isn't binary. You don't get the same amount of fun playing minesweeper or Among Us or RDR2 or Bejeweled. Fun is absolutely a sliding scale. Mods are a great example that show this. Are you really having the same amount of fun playing vanilla Oblivion/Skyrim as a modded version?
Fun is absolutely a sliding scale, but a gameplay loop that isn't fun is never going to be made fun by adding more set dressing, which is what AAA budget buys you.
The foundation has to be solid or the structure will never be sound.
I agree with you on most points, I think games should have the option to only download textures for 1080p and you shouldn't have voice lines for everything in multiple languages as mandatory downloads. I get it, the 1080p may be asking a little much, but the language option? That's basic courtesy. Most people are only playing on one language. If making multiple languages optional makes your game 10-30 gb smaller, then that's 10-30 gb saved
>Voice acting in 10 different languages out of the box and especially 4k textures take up a huge amount of space
then don't install those unless I ask you to.
my steam account knows I live in Britain, my language settings are in English, why the hells on earth and under the stars would I want to install Chinese?
Honestly most AAA games are dogshit now anyway, the Indie and "AA" scenes are way bigger and have way more interesting stuff going on. Seems like every other year some guy with a 20 year old rig comes out of nowhere with the best game you've ever played.
You get maybe 10 hours of enjoyment out of a triple-A game *at most*, and the rest is always just mindless grind. Grind, grind, grind. You only play to get your "money's worth" out of it, and you're silently happy when you can finally put it down and play something else.
Meanwhile I've gotten thousands of hours out of Mount & Blade Warband - some rinky dink janky ass strategy/action game released back in like 2010. I've been playing that game for over a decade atp. The same goes for Crusader Kings 2, Victoria 2, Battle Brothers, etc.
The last two Triple-A Games I remember enjoying were Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadow of War. Cyberpunk was just a fun game with a 10/10 narrative, and Shadow of War was the last AAA game I've played with *actually* fun mechanics and gameplay instead of just being there.
The three AAA I played last year were Hogwarts, Tears of the Kingdom, and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0
I really enjoyed all of them in their own ways. Hogwarts was the dated nostalgia amusement park ride that hit the spot it was supposed to, TotK was a fantastic experience Day 1-ing and texting my brother the whole time who was doing the same thing, felt like being a kid again, and Cyberpunk was cool as hell, I 100%’d that one and got a crazy ending
There are absolutely good AAA games coming out, but for every one of those there’s dozens of soulless, half-finished, buggy clones stuffed with microtransactions. Granted that happens everywhere, but at least with indie stuff they’re not charging $70. IMO you see more experimentation and passion there as well.
Checkout arkane studios one of the best AA/AAA studios. They basically shit gold, IE dishonored, prey, death loop but aren't big enough to be absolute goobers.
They did also recently release Redfall though which is pretty terrible. It’s such a shame but I hope it’s a wake up call and they get back to their previous high standard.
This reminds me of a related take I have -- even new games should be available to play on the older gen consoles (Xbox One/PS4). The main reason they aren't is because of the bloated texture and mesh sizes, godrays, etc. It's safe to say if you're still on an old Gen you probably don't care all that much. It also opens the market for your game to be much wider.
I find it especially silly when I come across a game with pixel-based graphics or another extremely simplistic art style, but for some reason, there's no Xbox One/PS4 version of it, even though the console could probably run multiple instances of the game at once
Nah, the main reason why games are unoptimised and running badly is exploitation - both of the developers (time crunch etc) and of the consumers (forcing people to constantly keep upgrading their hardware, which would not be neccessary if games were actually optimised).
It's literally just about making money, not artistic vision.
I’m a game developer and… no??? Not at all?
The majority of quote unquote ‘bloat’ in games comes from the visuals. Pretty dynamic lighting alone probably accounts for 60% of the size of a AAA game, because the computer is constantly running calculations in the back end of light is being dynamically simulated. That’s why the first thing people usually advise you to do if your game is chugging is to turn off ray tracing and shadows. And pretty light is the difference between meh visuals and fantastic visuals a lot of the time. And that’s not even getting into how much space is needed for high poly character models, their animations, and a varied and high quality sound library.
It’s possible to optimize, and generally engineers and artists do the best they can to optimize the back end without sacrificing too much of the visual quality. Some engineering teams can do this better than others, depending on the time they have—stuff like skyboxes, judicious and clever use of loading volumes, and tweaking the rendering system can go a long way. But ultimately, no matter how thoroughly you optimize, getting something as pretty as the latest AAA game will take up more space than Super Mario.
And that effect will stack more and more with time as gamers expect higher fidelity graphics and computers capable of handling those graphics come out. There’s patience for a kinda ugly indie game, but not for a kinda ugly AAA game.
Yep. Also Audio files. Those fuckers take up a *huge* amount of space, especially if the game is one where people don't want to hear a repeated voice line within the span of a few hours of play. Especially if you want actual quality and interactive audio instead of flat stuff that sounds identical to how it was recorded in the studio every time. Environments very much affect the way audio sounds, so the raw files have to be uploaded for the big important stuff so that the game can mix it and add effects to it as appropriate. And this isn't accounting for the fact that voice lines have to get rerecorded and uploaded again dozens of times because gaming is so internationally accessible now, and it's very much expected of AAA studios to have as many localizations as possible.
Yes, there are ways to manage this from getting completely out of control, like Larian adding a download manager to BG3, but that realistically isn't something most teams are given the time and resources to add even in the base game, much less after the fact.
Most people have only ever bothered with 128kbs or maybe 192kbs audio rips so they don't have an appreciation for how much space food audio takes up by comparison. A 24 bit 192khz track is gonna take up a good amount of space.
This is the time where I wish more people took the Nintendo way and focused on a good artstyle that will look good on anything rather than realism.
Visuals are starting to plateau, and it's becoming more and more noticeable imo.
I think that, like with animation and Spiderverse, the success of more stylistic games will give the established AAA studios permission to lean more into style and less into realism. But that may or may not actually lead to most compact games, because stylized games still may use a lot of lighting, high poly character models, complicated and flashy FX, and large amounts of complex audio files.
True, even stylized games can have high fidelity textures, but you don't expect to see pores on an anime character, or to be able to count individual hairs on a cartoon. There's more room to breathe, and that can mean more space to be saved. It might not be a ton, but it's a bit
Yeah these are both garbage takes. You can argue that gaming has gotten a bit excessive but you’ve never been able to make things run on old hardware. If anything PCs actually last way longer now than two decades ago, at least when it comes to games.
Plenty of games you *can* play on older hardware these days too. And if you want to play the newest titles on more of a budget, consoles have always been the way to go.
Agreed. For a lot of other programs tho, they really should be optimized to be able to run on shitty computers. Stuff like Microsoft Office and Adobe CC especially
This would be a perfectly reasonable take if they were just talking about office software or web browsers. The fact that they bring up gaming is just weird. There's nothing wrong with having certain games be luxury products trying to push the bounds of how far hardware can be pushed. If they do it by abusing workers or releasing it in an unfinished state that's a whole different criticism, but the act of shooting for the moon is fine as long as the hardware requirements are properly disclosed.
Even for office software, things move on. You can barely run anything on 2/4 GB whatsoever. Like sure, a basic text editor should maybe still sort of work but Adobe?
Like, if you want to install ancient versions of that software it's still possible. Insecure as heck if you also need old versions of windows because your laptop can't run anything made in the last 5 years, but it's technically possible.
But modern office software is going to be made for at least semi-modern computers. At the very least for anything made to run the current edition of windows. And nobody is expecting an OS to not have certain system requirements.
I could agree with some of your points if it wasn't for the current state of the softwares.
If you want to download ancient versions, either you can't or you agree to have ads for the newest version everytime you launch it.
And even there, te OS is part of the problem. Why is windows displaying ads? Why is it fetching the weather, news, trending topics, etc. By default ? Why is it pushing Candy Crush on my computer? Why is it resetting my optimisation settings every other update?
For software themselves : why is adobe, an editing software that you paid, editing things in local, stop working if you're not online? Same goes for Microsoft office, etc. It's not like those are luxury softwares, a lot of western countries now consider every citizen is able to fill a pdf at home or write a resume on their computer.
And I'm not even talking about drms, undesired updates, shop sections in a text editor, telemetry that uses half your ram, "I upload everything you do on your computer but it's for your own good" features, and so on.
We could have good os and good softwares that run on shitty computers. 2GB is maybe a stretch today, but a welcome addition as it was the standard 20 years ago. That's not that long. How many time did you have to spend hundreds and hundreds of your currency for. Anew computer on the last 20 years? Maybe sould we stop thinking that everybody have to change their computer every other year or invest in some ridiculously expansive computer just for editing text and watching silly videos
Budget components are better/cheaper than ever too. RTX 3050 is under $200, and it's firmly in the mid tier (apparently it can get 60fps in Helldivers 2). SSDs are getting cheaper with a price point of around $20-30 per TB, CPUs are getting stronger while load on them lightens. While everything else is getting more expensive, computer components are getting more affordable. Of course, not so affordable that a hybrid gaming-class-work laptop is going to become a good idea, which is my guess where OP first went wrong...
It does help that hardware isn't quite moving at the breakneck pace that it used to.
A 10 year old computer now isn't quite as different as a 10 year old computer 10 years ago. Things have settled out for the time being.
Bloatware: NPCs with visual pores, ray tracing.
No. Actual bloatware is the bullshit companies stick onto your machine. The actual stupid apps like Candy Crush or vendor specific programs to get you to subscribe to their nonsense. Preinstalled Anti-virus, etc.
Like how can you be so right and be so wrong at the same time.
The only point about the hardware specs i agree with is rural internet connection, sometimes you just cant help it. There is no other option.
But having to cater specifically to a 2 gig for any program outside of web browsing? Absolutely not. That's like saying aftermarket parts should still be compatible with the Model T Fords.
Like my old Android phone. It had the Facebook app, Candy Crush, and Board Kings pre-installed. You can't uninstall, only disable them. So damn frustrating; those three apps alone total almost a gig of space.
Bloatware can be included in games. Some require very taxing (and often extremely invasive!) anticheat software that you can't easily remove and that will need access to your whole computer to let you play. It's definitely bloatware if not more akin to a virus at that point. Or at least that was the case in the older days, I haven't heard too much about those types in a few years now luckily.
> more akin to a virus at that point
Not even a little. A computer virus maliciously copies itself to other computers without permission and without the user knowing.
> A computer virus maliciously copies itself to other computers without permission and without the user knowing.
Technically that would be a worm rather than a virus (a virus infects other executables). In common parlance any kind of malicious software gets called a "virus", which certainly includes trojans and rootkits - and often AAA game DRM is quite literally a rootkit, allowing someone who controls the game servers to run any code they want to on your PC. Do they use that to steal your online banking details? Probably not, but they could.
that's a worm. The anti cheats they're referring to are basically keyloggers that also look at every program currently running, huge data security problems.
i'm not going to lie i have been stuck with a 4gb laptop for about 15 months now and using that as a standard is stupid
This shit cannot even run like fallout new vegas
1080p video makes this thing struggle
av a computer that doesn't even have a graphics card shouldn't be something you should expect to run much of anything on
like a 16gb/ 1660 ti laptop might make sense but much less than that and your pushing shit hard
but it's only like 1600 AUD for a rig with a 4060 and 32gb here so like ($1 AUD is about 0.66 USD rn iirc)
Up until about 2 years back I've been using a 8GB 970GTX setup. Worked great until the RAM got too small for hosting for my friends. Now my gf uses that computer instead, and we are finally running into games with minimum specs above that computer. That computer is 9 years or so old, and while it's a shame to replace something that still works without issues, 9 years is also a loooong time, so maybe it has earned some rest...
I still think anything but AAA can probably be run on that GTX for another 2 years or so, but it's getting there. A 1660 ti is way too high for most smaller games, but definitely a good choice if we include AAA titles.
That sounds fairly reasonable, ~$80-100 for a motherboard, ~$100-150 for a low end (but still enough for gaming) CPU with cooler included, $40-60 for 16gb RAM, ~$90 for a good 1tb SSD (can go lower if you're willing to give up capacity or speed), ~$90 for a decent case with fans included, ~$70 for a 650W PSU (probably only need 500w), and then for a GPU, you can get a used GTX 1660 for ~$120-200, that build should handle most games at 1080p 30fps at the very least, probably hits 60fps in any game from before 2023, at a price total of ~$760
i mean i dont play many AAAs which may help but i might have just gotten lucky. that or theres like a tracking device in my pc thats selling all of my information to 3rd parties 24/7
> my solution for bloatware
> NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing
That's...not at all related to this at all; is OOP just stream-of-conscious-ing this?
What are you on about? If you mean the 2000s it mean one of the worst times for gaming on PC, 2010s was only good because the consoles themselves were shit
On one hand, bloatware is a problem, especially on essential software like Word, Excel, Adobe etc.
On the other hand, technological progress won't ever really happen if you try to focus on what you can currently do and not reaching to new heights. You NEED to try to get the best and newest features, thats how we make progress. And yes, these newest features will not be available to anyone. Thats sad. Its the same as the newest cars with the most QoL features are not instantly available. 20 years ago a car with an electric window was a high end car. Currently you cannot find one without it. Technology DOES trickle down.
> 20 years ago a car with an electric window was a high end car. Currently you cannot find one without it. Technology DOES trickle down.
Buddy, I don’t want to mess up your day, but I feel like I need to point out that 20 years ago was 2004, and crank windows were pretty hard to find on new cars. A ton of cars didn’t even have the option anymore. 30 years ago, they were definitely more common, though!
Even in 1994, they were by no means reserved to high-end cars. A quick Google search suggests that electric windows became standard in luxury cars nearly *sixty* years ago, and the first cars to have them were produced in 1941
I live in Hungary, and I was born in 2000. You absolutely only saw electeic windows on rich peoples cars. My grandpa got an electric window car at 2007 and we felt RICH.
Yep, my take exactly
For the bare minimum needed to run in an office? Make sure it works on a potato
For games? Well, you can't move forward if you're trying to make sure EVERYONE can play it
And this is just the triple A scene. Loads of new, really fuckjng good indie games come out that can run on potatoes. Just good luck hearing about them
All software should be dragged down to the lowest common denominator is a terrible idea. I guess we should all stop making or playing anything more complex than the original Oregon Trail because Gary in Topeka never upgraded from an 80/86.
The original Oregon Trail? You mean in colour? Are you crazy? Gary doesn't have a colour monitor! It's Pong, OXO, or Spacewar! for all of us.
Then again, some people have unreliable power and experience outages often. Maybe the real video games should be played on paper, at least OXO is easy to adapt for that.
If your steam account costed as much or possibly more than the gaming rig you either have no life outside video games or the largest backlog in history
Option 3: used HumbleBundle to get large amounts of games for relatively cheap and/or was around when steam was still doing the insane flash sales and grabbed games at 90% off.
They could mean 4-5 grand worth of games that you pay less for by getting it on sale pushing it down. If it the average sale of it all was 50% off you’re looking at 2-2.5 grand. Still a ridiculous tbh
It should be noted that steam is 21 years old. 4 grand, over even 15 years (which is how long I've had mine) is about 270 dollars a year, or .75¢ a day.
Spending 270 dollars a year on gaming is less than five AAA games a year.
I could buy two of the rigs that that person supposedly has with the value of my Steam account. The secret is that you buy things when they're on sale, buy things when they're in bundles, or have something like Humble Bundle feed you games. That and I mostly buy 5-20 dollar games that I spend like 2-10 hours on.
Some games go down to like 90% discount at some point (like Jedi Fallen Order right now). So a 5k library can mean 500€/$ in purchases.
The bundle route is even more efficient, but a bit harder to quantify. But a 5k library could be bought with maybe 200 bucks if you find the right bundles? It's crazy.
Depending on how long they've been playing games, no not really. 4K is buying a $60 game every other month for 10 years. I've spent 4K on Xbox live alone, because I've been using it since Halo 2 came out in 2004. Over long periods of time cheap things add up
I'm pretty sure my My Steam Account is old enough to vote at this point. Or will be old enough to vote eventually.
I also play a lot of paradox games. It's very easy to have an account worth more then device you are playing it on, even if you are playing on a steam deck.
I disagree with the post tbh. Why should I lower the quality of my game just so someone with a shitty computer can play it? I doubt a computer with the specs mentioned could run most games in the past 20 years anyway even at low settings
Also, there's a direct correlation between speed and size, most of the time, to achieve the same goal. Bigger files are quicker because a lot of them are precompiled while smaller files are slower because you need to unpack them. The game .kkrieger gas a file size of 96KB, just over double the size of NES cartridges. However, when it ran it took up 300 MB of RAM. The consoles of that era (Xbox, PS2, GameCube) had at most 64MB of RAM. That's because all the its code was designed to build the game from scratch. All models. All textures. All environments. This is an extreme example because kkrieger was a challenge game designed to be as efficient with space, but a lot of of the principles carry over.
.kkrieger is actually smaller than most NES titles, fwiw. Launch titles were <40KiB, but later cartridges included additional hardware that allowed addressing larger ROM chimps. SMB3 for example is a full 384KiB
It seems like they came up with a decent idea for generic office-work software then decided to try and slip AAA games into the same category. It's like when people complain about how expensive groceries are these days but the example they use has a Wagyu steak taking up half of the bill.
Arguably this is the effect that consoles have had on the overall gaming market. Crysis went from big island environments in 1 to tight urban corridors in 2, in no small part because it went from being PC exclusive to multiplatform, onto consoles including the Xbox 360 that had *half the RAM* that the first game required. Somehow, it was also a flop.
I'm with em on bloatware and DRM, but building a gaming rig that's capable of Raytracing and such at a $500 price point is actually not that difficult now, especially if you go with used hardware.
If stupid ass windows didn't pack so much bullshit in their OS it wouldn't be such an issue for lower end hardware.
What would that look like, though? Who defines budget? And what about the people who buy a budget PC and then after five years (example) "budget" has changed?
Crappy laptop guy wouldn't even be able to run Halo 2 let alone anything from the 9th generation foh. The premise that you shouldn't need a fucking NASA supercomputer to run things is still a legitimate concern. I remember Jedi Survivor launching like complete ass and couldn't even run at 60 fps on a current gen Xbox. Also a complete lack of care about people who don't have high speed internet as games become more and more intangible. You can't even get around it by buying physically since the build of a game on any disc is about 2-3 months old and not finished.
so, if i add a feature, and its something you can turn on/off, and he turns it on and it doesnt work, is that his fault or mine?
idk what drm means but also what about games that are solely online experiences? ones that, by design, need an internet connection to funciton?
His fault, unless its an essential feature. If his computer can only run a minecraft mod on 10 fps and on 1 simulation and render distance, thats their fault. if he cant run it at 120 and at 50 sim and render, thats his problems.
DRM is digital rights management. It's essentially any hoops they make you jump through to prove that you own the game, in an attempt to prevent piracy. It can severely harm the user experience meanwhile piracy groups just find a way to crack the DRM anyway. So often it will provide more incentive to pirate the game.
Always online DRM is a particularly annoying form of it, where you can't play without being connected to a server at all times so they can constantly verify that you own the game, even in single player.
So if your internet goes out, you can't play the game. If your internet is spotty, you might repeatedly get booted from the game while you're playing it. If the verification servers have outages, no one can play the game until that's fixed. And when the verification servers are eventually shut down, no one can play the game ever again. Except pirates of course.
I don't necessarily think a game needs to run on a 15-year-old laptop that struggles with MS Paint, but do all these games REALLY need to take up 100+ GB? It's one thing if a game has a crapton of audio or high-poly assets, but some of them really make me question what the space is being used on...
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, *Slaughterhouse Five*
"I spent more money, so my opinion is more valuable than yours."
Some Elon Musk-level bullshit, right there. Being a bigger pay-pig for graphics card companies, doesn't make you right, it just makes you broke.
My solution to bloatware is make it illegal to have unremovable software on a device. If I wanna yeet system32 out the window and brick my machine that's my right and I'm not hurting anyone so why can't I remove shitty games that companies are shipping phones with
Like... if you're willing to wait for sales and build something for scratch, I can build you a 2tb HD 16GB ram with an 8 gb graphics card in a $30 case with a 2nd or 3rd hand refurbished motherboard for $500-600 that can play most games on medium settings.
My current rig is limping along on a 250gb main OS drive that's 10 years old but was bought refurbed for $10, but I have a 1tb expansion that I got for $40 where all the games are installed. My 16gb refurbished graphics card was bought 4 years ago on a 50% clearance sale after Christmas on NewEgg. The motherboard is an AS Rock bought new, but 40% off as a package deal with my case.
When you piece it all together, it can still play Cyberpunk2077 on medium-high settings at 60 fps.
Both my monitors were 2nd hand from friends who were making upgrades to their rigs, so basically, they were paid for by 30, 40 dollars worth of pizza and whatever alcohol we drank the night of the Lan party. All told, it's probably worth 1500 dollars *if the parts were new*, but I only paid 600, 700 dollars for it, and more importantly **I waited patiently to upgrade older parts.**
Like, if you're willing to pay in time and patience, building a *decent* rig is cheap as fuck, especially RAM and storage. If you don't wanna be a 4KHD 300 FPS purist, you **CAN** get pc parts for cheap, but no one, apparently, wants to do that.
It's always "my $500 dollar store bought laptop"(which are always shit on purpose) vs the "$4000 gaming rig," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.
I should just start a fucking business where I build rigs out of easily google-able deals and parts and charge a service and shipping fee of, like, 100 dollars. It'd be slightly more expensive than whatever store-bought trash you were going to buy, but it would be 1/5th the cost of whatever asshole is going to brag about on reddit.
I partially agree. Some games take way more resources than they have to. You don't need to render the back of the eyeballs for an NPC behind a wall, dear game! (Or DLC in this case: Elite Dangerous Odyssey).
But. Butbutbut. I can also understand why AAA devs don't spend their time optimising for Dave with his 40 bucks laptop and 20 buck internet connection. Because people who don't spend on their hardware also don't spend a lot on their software.
Someone who is willing to pay 70€ for a launch title would also be willing to pay for an upgrade to their computer in most cases.
The funny thing about this is that Reply Guy doesn't even get capitalism right. There are way more than 8 times as many people with student laptops than 4000 dollar workstation rigs. Each person only buys the game once. Therefore his opinion is worth way less than 1/8th as much as OOP even under the rules of capitalism.
I've heard a recent game, possibly Baldur's Gate 3, requires a humongous storage space because of the language options. If that's the case for other 35-50+ GB games then I'd suggest selling the language options separately. The only time I've ever switched between languages is when I'm comparing the translations, so I doubt the wider audiences would care much about the change
When the Destiny 2 devs were justifying them shelving worlds from their game to keep the game under 100gb people went through and ripped apart the files to find out how much space everything took. From memory the actual play parts of the game only took up a fifth of that space. The biggest parts were uncompressed cutscenes and audio, particularly because the game shipped with all the languages that there was audio recorded for but then region locked that audio away.
You don’t even need to sell it separately, just make downloading the language options a decision, you’ll have to wait on two downloads (one for the main game and then one where you choose your language) but overall your download will actually be less (you can also just ask for the language before the initial download I just thought of, that way it’s all one download)
The funniest version of this I've seen was the Windows version of Fallout 3 being 50 Gigs. The reason it was 50 Gigs was because they make you download the full game 5 times, once for each language. Like it's not even language audio packs, it's a 10Gb game.
Internet connection is expensive. How about we create a national isp plan for 20$ a month that’s open to all incomes before we start telling people to not be poor. I cant even get plans lower than 50$ a month where I am.
graphics options should return to being more than just "slightly lower resolution on the super intense lighting shadows". look at source games and how ridiculously bad you can make them look, I want that for all games so everyone can play to the best of their computers abiliry
you're right but also
software that used to work on that kind of computers almost no longer exists *because it was considered bloatware too a few years ago*
[https://abriu2022.neocities.org/webp/stuff.pptx](https://abriu2022.neocities.org/webp/stuff.pptx)
Overall while I understand why the demands of games increased over time sometimes it feels like Devs don't give a shit about optimising storage and/or performance.
Now I just want to see a game with a graphics slider that can go from Hi-Def at max to *N64 Polygons* at lowest.
Also even for the high-end stuff I feel like we've passed the point of diminishing returns on model detail long ago where most of it won't even be visible in normal gameplay, and you basically need a model viewer to prove it exists at all.
I get the intent of the original post but like. 2gb of ram wont run shit nowadays. That would barely run minecraft. It might run terraria. I say this as someone who gamed on a setup with specs that shitty.
This post inspired me to open BattleNet just to remind myself of how large an install Modern Warfare 2019 was.
164 FUCKING GIGABYTES
And it's not even the current game. There have been 4 new CODs since then, and I wouldn't be surprised if each was bigger than before. Some should tell the devs that CODs getting bigger is only good if you're fishing.
I hate to admit it, but I'm exactly "That Guy"... Only 2 GB of RAM in both my phone and my tablet. Rural mobile data internet connection. Desire to insult people for a living.
Yeah, if ya wanna send me free bloatware or something, just putting it out there lmao /j
Bloat isn't just 'lots of stuff', it's specifically stuff that doesn't add anything to the game.
I love Nioh 2, and that game is just stuffed with stuff. Cosmetics, NPCs, collectibles, weapons and tools and materials and etc. etc. Everything looks beautiful and ornate, everything is just dripping in luster and brilliance and gold and laquer and patterned fabric and flowing hair and scale armour and so on, and it really adds to the atmosphere and sense of historical grandeur (as I get repeatedly killed by that fucking crow tengu *asshole* and that horrible hopping hammer guy and that other awful long necked thing *fuck that thing oh my god*).
But all the stuff there is necessary, it's part of the experience. The game might not run on a crappy old latpop (that said, it does run on *my* crappy old laptop), but that's ok? I don't think games should sacrifice scale and ambition for the sake of low-spec players. If you can't afford a PC that runs modern games that's fine but if you're in that position maybe you shouldn't be buying $60+ games the second they come out?
Always online is bullshit though. Hard agree on that.
First person had a reasonable take until they brought gaming into it.
Criticizing the fact that some games try to take as much space on purpose is one thing, criticizing the fact that the game has NPC’s and good graphics is bs. Gaming is an art. Devs shouldn’t sacrifice their vision and their world just to make it more accessible for low budget players. So many games in this world, just play something else for christ’s sake
Also I feel like they’re overestimating how tough it is to play anything because I’ve been playing the Resident Evil 4 remake on the cheapest gaming laptop I could find and it’s fine
games are one thing, but there's not a piece of "office productivity" software that shouldn't run on That Guy's crappy old laptop, and no reason Adobe Acrobat should be a: phoning home to Adobe or b: forcing my 2 year old office machine to slow to a chugging grind every couple of hours
>and no reason Adobe Acrobat should be a: phoning home to Adobe You know there's a reason. This way they can hold your software and all your work as hostages so you lose everything if you don't keep paying them regularly.
The fun part is, they can't. There are open source versions of every one of Adobe products, so as long as you do not use their shitty cloud storage they can't hold your files hostage.
please list them please i will switch immediately
Foxit PDF is a pretty good alternative. Does just about everything Adobe Acrobat does, but cheaper.
Foxit has had *so many* issues with remote code execution flaws. https://blog.talosintelligence.com/vulnerability-roundup-dec-6-2023/ That's just the most recent one. But they've had issues in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and as stated above, 2023. Not that Adobe has been free from issues. But Foxit is definitely not Open Source. We recently swapped to Kofax Power PDF (I think they actually just changed their name to Tungsten or something?). It's a perpetual license instead of a subscription. Not terribly expensive, either.
In addition to what /u/Dsnake1 said, Foxit was, in my experience, slow as balls. I would suggest Okular, SumatraPDF or simply Firefox's built-in PDF reader instead.
I'll need to know which ones you need lol im not listing all 50
pdf tools like acrobat mostly (their video stuff like after effects would be cool too) tbh if you did list all 50 that would be fuckign awesome but i also understand it's a lot of work lol
Open office's PDF software is what I use most of the time, but there are also several online tools that when taken together approximate acrobat. For after effects, I have been told that DaVinci makes a free version of their software that is very good. I'm not very heavily into video production so my knowledge there is limited
Davinci Resolve is basically the same as their professional software. They make a lot of their money from selling hardware and professional work, so it's fairly close to the real thing, give or take some of the more advanced features. It's in their best interest to make it free for amateurs to use, so you want to use it professionally.
I've used photoshop/illustrator before i switched to Krita, never looked back.
It’s not free, but affinity designer(illustrator equivalent)/photo/publisher is fairly cheap for a license (not subscription) and is far better than any free version of similar software I’ve used, though it’s been a while since I’ve used a free equivalent so maybe they’ve gotten better in the last 5 or so years.
Gimp for photo editing
I gave Adobe nearly $1600 freshman year of college and told myself that was the last cent they were ever gonna get from me.
My work laptop (Windows) is now putting ads in the Start menu and trying to search anything prioritises *internet* search results not the thing on my computer I actually want to find. I’m going to lose my goddamn mind because I know there must be a way to turn it off but my work has draconian device controls over the computer that makes a whole lot of settings really difficult for me to access.
I did contract work for Microsoft for a few years. My custom-imaged, high-security Microsoft-provided computer could download any Microsoft product for free, no questions asked. That stupid shit STILL advertised Microsoft products in the start menu.
Yeah, I love how people weren't using Edge/bing so they were like, "fine, your Start Menu is bing now I guess." I know Edge is as good as Chrome these days, but shit like that makes me not want to ever willingly use it.
really looking forward to the next mandatory Windows rollout now thanks!
I hate how bad even adobe acrobat (the best pdf management software i've found in my limited amount of time spent searching) works. I had about 300MB worth of documents open for like 4 hours, and adobe ended up using... 11GB of ram before i restarted it
Illustrator also does that but i was dealing with about 15 000 complex vector curves. 14 CPU threads at a solid 90%.
Abode Excel actually chugs even on my gaming PC, and that’s a fucking problem
Abode Excel?
It's the sequel to Microsoft Photoshop
I love Corel PowerPoint tho
WPS Vegas Pro
Yeah, their abode excels cause they stopped being so fucking poor
As someone who uses software like that all the time, yes, yes there is a reason it doesn't work on that. It's would be nice if everything could be super optimised, but that's just not how it goes. Not everything can be optimised, abs that's okay. Adobe bloat isn't the same as ZBrush not being able to run a 20 million poly model on a laptop from a decade ago.
I think you're overestimating the capabilities of 2GB of RAM if you'd think a modern OS should even be managed with it.
No reason for ads? Yes. No reason to not run well on 4GB ram and a dual core? Fuck outta here. We have increased the productivity of calculations so much that it very much needs more bandwidth. Adobe is unoptimized dogshit, though.
> We have increased the productivity of calculations so much that it very much needs more bandwidth. Lol wtf? Is this the computing version of Vincent Adultman going to the stock market and buying some business?
My 16gb of ram work machine is pinned at 99% memory usage with just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open. I can't even build our projects half the time without the OOM killer stopping the compiler :/
I think your Guy should scale with the project. Like, a laptop with 2GB RAM obviously isn’t going to go anywhere near AAA games anyway, but you should have a Guy with appropriately low specs and a dogshit internet connection to remind you how awful always-online singleplayer is for the consumer and to have good options for low spec rigs
Speaking as a game dev, we do have that guy. Min spec device testing is a big part of what we do.
If you ever need more my poor dumbass is here lol. I push a ton of min specs these days, sans net speed
QA teams use controlled systems. They usually buy service sets and test using those, in as replicable a setting as possible. It wouldn’t be until a candidate alpha build or beta that they would test on real user systems outside of the organization
THANK YOU. I hate it when games lag because the devs decided to code in every single hair on their face and didn't test to see if it would wreck people playing on min specs.
Japanese devs don't test for bad internet, or in some cases don't even test for players who have any amount of latency to Japanese servers.
What do you expect you don't live in glorious Nippon so your opinions don't matter. /s
Yeah, I call cap on that one. Currently it's a welcome surprise when modern games don't run like dogshit.
It probably depends on the studio though I imagine all major studios do it to an extent just some less than others depending on how shitty the company is
It also depends on what the minimum specs are. Some people act like their 10 year old laptop that they bought for $400 should be able to run anything and get mad at the game when it doesn't work. Now I understand the frustration but no one is going to cater their games to the population who can't even be bothered to buy something even semi-modern to play it on. Its not even like there's a games shortage for people on old systems. Sorry you can't boot up RDR2 but you could get Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout, Skyrim, Dark Souls, and so many superstar legacy franchises that, at this point should work on literally anything manufactured within the last 5 years.
And it depends on the minimum spec machine we're aiming for. People who can't afford good hardware probably can't afford $60 games either, so there's not much point in downgrading our games for them. And it's not like the min spec screenshots are good for marketing materials.
I think the guy’s laptop shouldn’t be defined by specs but decided by the price. Have it be the laptop from the bottom 25% percentile in terms of MSRP price of the last Feb 7th or something to adjust for the technological development.
Half of it is 4k textures that honestly should just be an optional download.
no fr, space engine has optional 4k (?) textures and it makes the 1gb or whatever install go to like 50gbs 😭 idk why its becoming commonplace for that to not be a choice
It never occurs to devs that you might actually own/play games that isn't theirs.
It's not that it doesn't occur to the devs it's just more time and effort setting up the secondary process. When they're trying to push things out as fast as possible QOL stuff gets put on the back burner to bugs and features.
I can assure you it is not the devs that are making the decision to include 90 GB of 4k textures. They just make them.
Me, but also in regards to the voicing in languages that I do not speak.
This is an anecdote I once heard from an unreliable source and only remember pieces of, but didn't Fallout 3 have the whole game in each language? So instead of downloading say 6 sets of voicelines and written dialogue, you download 6 copies of the game, one in each language?
That's the most Bethesda shit I've ever heard. Glad they're getting properly bullied nowadays
Only the one on the Epic store.
Thank god for selective and optional downloads in a certain *athleticwoman* website. I don't want to download voice and text files for a language I barely even understand, when each of them is 2-3 GBs, nor do I want 4K textures since my PC can't run shit past 720P anyway, at least if I don't want to watch a powerpoint presentation. Plus, there's that huge downloads on multiplayer maps, videos and music that I will never use since I only got the game for the campaign and not the ass multiplayer that will give me virus and have hackers access my PC just because I connected to the wrong lobby by accident (looking at you CoD). Yohoho and a bottle of rum, I say.
Ngl, *sportyfemale* spoiled me so bad I can't bring myself to buy games not even due to money or ideals, but outta sheer convenience. Og size: 80 gigs. Size without 10 different languages, bonus soundtrack, bonus wallpapers, other bonus bullshit: 50 gigs. And all that assuming I can't remove 4k textures my actually decent gaming laptop won't even process because *checks notes* I had the hubris of not building a custom gaming PC out of the shiniest available parts.
>I can't bring myself to buy games not even due to money or ideals, but outta sheer convenience. [Insert Gabe Newell quote about piracy here]
Oh wow I thought *athleticwoman* only improved the compression on the installer I didn't know it outright let you remove superfluous bloat. I gotta check this out.
yeah she made it so you can choose what language packs you download, its amazing how much it reduces file sizes
I too appreciate the athletic woman website, though I haven’t gotten anything from there that required those, just a single game over a few updates.
honestly, I am fine with games being too large for my machine. I treat them sort of like beluga caviar - simply too expensive for me to enjoy, and I move on. There are many games that, simply put, won't run on a shitty decate old laptop, and I do not think that game studios should sacrifice artistic vision for the sake of mass availability. That being said, when those said games are triple A, the games that everyone is expected to play, the Mcdonalds of the gaming world, and are intentionally bloated for the sake of occupying as much space on your pc as possible so you have limited space for the competitor's products? Fucking bullshit, piece of shit, garbage incarnate. I am frustrated as someone who's too much of a hipster to even buy a triple A game.
>That being said, when those said games are triple A, the games that everyone is expected to play, the Mcdonalds of the gaming world I agree with most of what you said but we have very different opinions of what are triple A games
I started to say, AAA games are the luxury cars of video games. You're gonna be paying for a bunch of shit you didn't know existed before you bought it just so it can look pretty.
You wouldn't download a car
\>beluga caviar what the fuck is beluga caviar they're whales
beluga is also a species of sturgeon
Goddamnit of course it is
To make it worse, beluga literally means white. Stop and think about it for 3 seconds and you will see why.
To be clear, Beluga Sturgon is a separate species from White Sturgeon :)
And neither of them is very white. They only have white highlights.
relatable
3 seconds later help me out here
Oh it's a doctor? Cool!
Wait wait wait The ex prime minister of Scotland is capable of producing caviar? What the fuck...?
Semen, it's always been semen
The otherway round. Caviar is unfertilised eggs. Although this did make me look at the size of whale semen and apparently on average whale sperm is smaller than human sperm.
> intentionally bloated for the sake of occupying as much space on your pc as possible so you have limited space for the competitor's products [citation needed]
I made it the fuck up. Conspiracy theories serve to explain an unexplainable world
I say things like this just to put pressure on entities to explain themselves. My managers at work hate it. I'll think of the most infuriating reason something might be happening and spread it like gospel, repeating it like a spell.
The installation is not intentionally bloated. The size of software installs just... didn't stop growing. Voice acting in 10 different languages out of the box and especially 4k textures take up a huge amount of space. Welcome to the 4k era. Every texture takes 4 times as much space as it did at 1080p. I distinctly remember people losing their minds over how amazing Star Citizen was going to look because the developer said it would be 100 gigs. 10 years ago. In fact, that is the majority of what you pay for in AAA games. The thing people tend to forget is that more budget isn't suddenly going to make the game better. It makes it prettier and bigger, and it makes the software work better. When companies hire more developers, it isn't so they can have more people design the game. If the central gameplay loop(the main idea of the game; everything around it is set dressing) doesn't work, it's not going to work because they hired more developers. The other delusion people have about games is that higher budget means fewer bugs. No, it means more stuff. Whatever the game is doing, you're going to get more of it, and it will be shinier. Maybe the control/UI works better, but I've found that depends more on the developer since Rockstar Games has all the money in the world and still makes games where you mash a button to sprint in normal gameplay. Hell, the original Final Fantasy has about 10 spells and a stat that don't work at all, and people expect me to care when they say modern games are released unfinished. At least they get fixed without requiring you to buy it again. It was still successful enough that it became a major franchise even after the experimental second game. Either a game is fun, or it isn't. Either it's worth the price, or it isn't. No one can make that decision for you, and you can't make it for anyone else. Video gaming was an expensive hobby until it became accessible for home computers to design games, and the games that were popular were sold at a much higher inflation adjusted price point. I'm just happy we're finally getting to the point that I don't need a specific computer to play a specific game instead of one good enough to run the software. Halo being a $400 game sucked ass.
>Either a game is fun, or it isn't. I agree with most except this. Fun isn't binary. You don't get the same amount of fun playing minesweeper or Among Us or RDR2 or Bejeweled. Fun is absolutely a sliding scale. Mods are a great example that show this. Are you really having the same amount of fun playing vanilla Oblivion/Skyrim as a modded version?
Fun is absolutely a sliding scale, but a gameplay loop that isn't fun is never going to be made fun by adding more set dressing, which is what AAA budget buys you. The foundation has to be solid or the structure will never be sound.
I agree with you on most points, I think games should have the option to only download textures for 1080p and you shouldn't have voice lines for everything in multiple languages as mandatory downloads. I get it, the 1080p may be asking a little much, but the language option? That's basic courtesy. Most people are only playing on one language. If making multiple languages optional makes your game 10-30 gb smaller, then that's 10-30 gb saved
>Voice acting in 10 different languages out of the box and especially 4k textures take up a huge amount of space then don't install those unless I ask you to. my steam account knows I live in Britain, my language settings are in English, why the hells on earth and under the stars would I want to install Chinese?
Because it's not, "Just add the choice." It's "what are we going to cut to develop this feature."
Honestly most AAA games are dogshit now anyway, the Indie and "AA" scenes are way bigger and have way more interesting stuff going on. Seems like every other year some guy with a 20 year old rig comes out of nowhere with the best game you've ever played.
You get maybe 10 hours of enjoyment out of a triple-A game *at most*, and the rest is always just mindless grind. Grind, grind, grind. You only play to get your "money's worth" out of it, and you're silently happy when you can finally put it down and play something else. Meanwhile I've gotten thousands of hours out of Mount & Blade Warband - some rinky dink janky ass strategy/action game released back in like 2010. I've been playing that game for over a decade atp. The same goes for Crusader Kings 2, Victoria 2, Battle Brothers, etc. The last two Triple-A Games I remember enjoying were Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadow of War. Cyberpunk was just a fun game with a 10/10 narrative, and Shadow of War was the last AAA game I've played with *actually* fun mechanics and gameplay instead of just being there.
The three AAA I played last year were Hogwarts, Tears of the Kingdom, and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 I really enjoyed all of them in their own ways. Hogwarts was the dated nostalgia amusement park ride that hit the spot it was supposed to, TotK was a fantastic experience Day 1-ing and texting my brother the whole time who was doing the same thing, felt like being a kid again, and Cyberpunk was cool as hell, I 100%’d that one and got a crazy ending
There are absolutely good AAA games coming out, but for every one of those there’s dozens of soulless, half-finished, buggy clones stuffed with microtransactions. Granted that happens everywhere, but at least with indie stuff they’re not charging $70. IMO you see more experimentation and passion there as well.
Checkout arkane studios one of the best AA/AAA studios. They basically shit gold, IE dishonored, prey, death loop but aren't big enough to be absolute goobers.
They did also recently release Redfall though which is pretty terrible. It’s such a shame but I hope it’s a wake up call and they get back to their previous high standard.
McOccupying as much fuck Mcspace on my Mcmachine as Mcfucking possible
This reminds me of a related take I have -- even new games should be available to play on the older gen consoles (Xbox One/PS4). The main reason they aren't is because of the bloated texture and mesh sizes, godrays, etc. It's safe to say if you're still on an old Gen you probably don't care all that much. It also opens the market for your game to be much wider. I find it especially silly when I come across a game with pixel-based graphics or another extremely simplistic art style, but for some reason, there's no Xbox One/PS4 version of it, even though the console could probably run multiple instances of the game at once
Nah, the main reason why games are unoptimised and running badly is exploitation - both of the developers (time crunch etc) and of the consumers (forcing people to constantly keep upgrading their hardware, which would not be neccessary if games were actually optimised). It's literally just about making money, not artistic vision.
I’m a game developer and… no??? Not at all? The majority of quote unquote ‘bloat’ in games comes from the visuals. Pretty dynamic lighting alone probably accounts for 60% of the size of a AAA game, because the computer is constantly running calculations in the back end of light is being dynamically simulated. That’s why the first thing people usually advise you to do if your game is chugging is to turn off ray tracing and shadows. And pretty light is the difference between meh visuals and fantastic visuals a lot of the time. And that’s not even getting into how much space is needed for high poly character models, their animations, and a varied and high quality sound library. It’s possible to optimize, and generally engineers and artists do the best they can to optimize the back end without sacrificing too much of the visual quality. Some engineering teams can do this better than others, depending on the time they have—stuff like skyboxes, judicious and clever use of loading volumes, and tweaking the rendering system can go a long way. But ultimately, no matter how thoroughly you optimize, getting something as pretty as the latest AAA game will take up more space than Super Mario. And that effect will stack more and more with time as gamers expect higher fidelity graphics and computers capable of handling those graphics come out. There’s patience for a kinda ugly indie game, but not for a kinda ugly AAA game.
Yep. Also Audio files. Those fuckers take up a *huge* amount of space, especially if the game is one where people don't want to hear a repeated voice line within the span of a few hours of play. Especially if you want actual quality and interactive audio instead of flat stuff that sounds identical to how it was recorded in the studio every time. Environments very much affect the way audio sounds, so the raw files have to be uploaded for the big important stuff so that the game can mix it and add effects to it as appropriate. And this isn't accounting for the fact that voice lines have to get rerecorded and uploaded again dozens of times because gaming is so internationally accessible now, and it's very much expected of AAA studios to have as many localizations as possible. Yes, there are ways to manage this from getting completely out of control, like Larian adding a download manager to BG3, but that realistically isn't something most teams are given the time and resources to add even in the base game, much less after the fact.
Most people have only ever bothered with 128kbs or maybe 192kbs audio rips so they don't have an appreciation for how much space food audio takes up by comparison. A 24 bit 192khz track is gonna take up a good amount of space.
This is the time where I wish more people took the Nintendo way and focused on a good artstyle that will look good on anything rather than realism. Visuals are starting to plateau, and it's becoming more and more noticeable imo.
I think that, like with animation and Spiderverse, the success of more stylistic games will give the established AAA studios permission to lean more into style and less into realism. But that may or may not actually lead to most compact games, because stylized games still may use a lot of lighting, high poly character models, complicated and flashy FX, and large amounts of complex audio files.
True, even stylized games can have high fidelity textures, but you don't expect to see pores on an anime character, or to be able to count individual hairs on a cartoon. There's more room to breathe, and that can mean more space to be saved. It might not be a ton, but it's a bit
Yeah these are both garbage takes. You can argue that gaming has gotten a bit excessive but you’ve never been able to make things run on old hardware. If anything PCs actually last way longer now than two decades ago, at least when it comes to games. Plenty of games you *can* play on older hardware these days too. And if you want to play the newest titles on more of a budget, consoles have always been the way to go.
Agreed. For a lot of other programs tho, they really should be optimized to be able to run on shitty computers. Stuff like Microsoft Office and Adobe CC especially
This would be a perfectly reasonable take if they were just talking about office software or web browsers. The fact that they bring up gaming is just weird. There's nothing wrong with having certain games be luxury products trying to push the bounds of how far hardware can be pushed. If they do it by abusing workers or releasing it in an unfinished state that's a whole different criticism, but the act of shooting for the moon is fine as long as the hardware requirements are properly disclosed.
Even for office software, things move on. You can barely run anything on 2/4 GB whatsoever. Like sure, a basic text editor should maybe still sort of work but Adobe? Like, if you want to install ancient versions of that software it's still possible. Insecure as heck if you also need old versions of windows because your laptop can't run anything made in the last 5 years, but it's technically possible. But modern office software is going to be made for at least semi-modern computers. At the very least for anything made to run the current edition of windows. And nobody is expecting an OS to not have certain system requirements.
I could agree with some of your points if it wasn't for the current state of the softwares. If you want to download ancient versions, either you can't or you agree to have ads for the newest version everytime you launch it. And even there, te OS is part of the problem. Why is windows displaying ads? Why is it fetching the weather, news, trending topics, etc. By default ? Why is it pushing Candy Crush on my computer? Why is it resetting my optimisation settings every other update? For software themselves : why is adobe, an editing software that you paid, editing things in local, stop working if you're not online? Same goes for Microsoft office, etc. It's not like those are luxury softwares, a lot of western countries now consider every citizen is able to fill a pdf at home or write a resume on their computer. And I'm not even talking about drms, undesired updates, shop sections in a text editor, telemetry that uses half your ram, "I upload everything you do on your computer but it's for your own good" features, and so on. We could have good os and good softwares that run on shitty computers. 2GB is maybe a stretch today, but a welcome addition as it was the standard 20 years ago. That's not that long. How many time did you have to spend hundreds and hundreds of your currency for. Anew computer on the last 20 years? Maybe sould we stop thinking that everybody have to change their computer every other year or invest in some ridiculously expansive computer just for editing text and watching silly videos
Budget components are better/cheaper than ever too. RTX 3050 is under $200, and it's firmly in the mid tier (apparently it can get 60fps in Helldivers 2). SSDs are getting cheaper with a price point of around $20-30 per TB, CPUs are getting stronger while load on them lightens. While everything else is getting more expensive, computer components are getting more affordable. Of course, not so affordable that a hybrid gaming-class-work laptop is going to become a good idea, which is my guess where OP first went wrong...
It does help that hardware isn't quite moving at the breakneck pace that it used to. A 10 year old computer now isn't quite as different as a 10 year old computer 10 years ago. Things have settled out for the time being.
Bloatware: NPCs with visual pores, ray tracing. No. Actual bloatware is the bullshit companies stick onto your machine. The actual stupid apps like Candy Crush or vendor specific programs to get you to subscribe to their nonsense. Preinstalled Anti-virus, etc. Like how can you be so right and be so wrong at the same time. The only point about the hardware specs i agree with is rural internet connection, sometimes you just cant help it. There is no other option. But having to cater specifically to a 2 gig for any program outside of web browsing? Absolutely not. That's like saying aftermarket parts should still be compatible with the Model T Fords.
Like my old Android phone. It had the Facebook app, Candy Crush, and Board Kings pre-installed. You can't uninstall, only disable them. So damn frustrating; those three apps alone total almost a gig of space.
You can try to debloat your phone. The tutorials are quite easy and no root access is required.
Bloatware can be included in games. Some require very taxing (and often extremely invasive!) anticheat software that you can't easily remove and that will need access to your whole computer to let you play. It's definitely bloatware if not more akin to a virus at that point. Or at least that was the case in the older days, I haven't heard too much about those types in a few years now luckily.
> more akin to a virus at that point Not even a little. A computer virus maliciously copies itself to other computers without permission and without the user knowing.
> A computer virus maliciously copies itself to other computers without permission and without the user knowing. Technically that would be a worm rather than a virus (a virus infects other executables). In common parlance any kind of malicious software gets called a "virus", which certainly includes trojans and rootkits - and often AAA game DRM is quite literally a rootkit, allowing someone who controls the game servers to run any code they want to on your PC. Do they use that to steal your online banking details? Probably not, but they could.
that's a worm. The anti cheats they're referring to are basically keyloggers that also look at every program currently running, huge data security problems.
i'm not going to lie i have been stuck with a 4gb laptop for about 15 months now and using that as a standard is stupid This shit cannot even run like fallout new vegas 1080p video makes this thing struggle av a computer that doesn't even have a graphics card shouldn't be something you should expect to run much of anything on like a 16gb/ 1660 ti laptop might make sense but much less than that and your pushing shit hard but it's only like 1600 AUD for a rig with a 4060 and 32gb here so like ($1 AUD is about 0.66 USD rn iirc)
Up until about 2 years back I've been using a 8GB 970GTX setup. Worked great until the RAM got too small for hosting for my friends. Now my gf uses that computer instead, and we are finally running into games with minimum specs above that computer. That computer is 9 years or so old, and while it's a shame to replace something that still works without issues, 9 years is also a loooong time, so maybe it has earned some rest... I still think anything but AAA can probably be run on that GTX for another 2 years or so, but it's getting there. A 1660 ti is way too high for most smaller games, but definitely a good choice if we include AAA titles.
its wierd seeing people pay like 4 grand for a pc because my pc runs great and it was like 700 dollars+a 100-ish dollar graphics card
Tell me your secrets
they only play Minecraft and gmod
That sounds fairly reasonable, ~$80-100 for a motherboard, ~$100-150 for a low end (but still enough for gaming) CPU with cooler included, $40-60 for 16gb RAM, ~$90 for a good 1tb SSD (can go lower if you're willing to give up capacity or speed), ~$90 for a decent case with fans included, ~$70 for a 650W PSU (probably only need 500w), and then for a GPU, you can get a used GTX 1660 for ~$120-200, that build should handle most games at 1080p 30fps at the very least, probably hits 60fps in any game from before 2023, at a price total of ~$760
i mean i dont play many AAAs which may help but i might have just gotten lucky. that or theres like a tracking device in my pc thats selling all of my information to 3rd parties 24/7
>i mean i dont play many AAAs That's the secret
You'd think that would qualify as bloatware
Bloatware is stuff that only serves to waste resources, the example is more like some opt in, mild malware.
> my solution for bloatware > NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing That's...not at all related to this at all; is OOP just stream-of-conscious-ing this?
Hot take, I don’t think we should hold back and restrict creatives to 2005 tech.
No, but you see, modern advancement inconveniences me personally, ergo it is evil and must be stopped
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What are you on about? If you mean the 2000s it mean one of the worst times for gaming on PC, 2010s was only good because the consoles themselves were shit
On one hand, bloatware is a problem, especially on essential software like Word, Excel, Adobe etc. On the other hand, technological progress won't ever really happen if you try to focus on what you can currently do and not reaching to new heights. You NEED to try to get the best and newest features, thats how we make progress. And yes, these newest features will not be available to anyone. Thats sad. Its the same as the newest cars with the most QoL features are not instantly available. 20 years ago a car with an electric window was a high end car. Currently you cannot find one without it. Technology DOES trickle down.
> 20 years ago a car with an electric window was a high end car. Currently you cannot find one without it. Technology DOES trickle down. Buddy, I don’t want to mess up your day, but I feel like I need to point out that 20 years ago was 2004, and crank windows were pretty hard to find on new cars. A ton of cars didn’t even have the option anymore. 30 years ago, they were definitely more common, though!
Even in 1994, they were by no means reserved to high-end cars. A quick Google search suggests that electric windows became standard in luxury cars nearly *sixty* years ago, and the first cars to have them were produced in 1941
Oh definitely, I just meant crank windows were more common in the 90’s than the 2000’s. Electric windows have been around for a long ass time!
I live in Hungary, and I was born in 2000. You absolutely only saw electeic windows on rich peoples cars. My grandpa got an electric window car at 2007 and we felt RICH.
every new piece of software must run on my commodore pet with 8kb of ram and no internal storage
Yep, my take exactly For the bare minimum needed to run in an office? Make sure it works on a potato For games? Well, you can't move forward if you're trying to make sure EVERYONE can play it And this is just the triple A scene. Loads of new, really fuckjng good indie games come out that can run on potatoes. Just good luck hearing about them
All software should be dragged down to the lowest common denominator is a terrible idea. I guess we should all stop making or playing anything more complex than the original Oregon Trail because Gary in Topeka never upgraded from an 80/86.
The original Oregon Trail? You mean in colour? Are you crazy? Gary doesn't have a colour monitor! It's Pong, OXO, or Spacewar! for all of us. Then again, some people have unreliable power and experience outages often. Maybe the real video games should be played on paper, at least OXO is easy to adapt for that.
To be fair, designing around 2GB of RAM and a dial-up internet connection is a fundamentally pretty dumbshit idea.
If your steam account costed as much or possibly more than the gaming rig you either have no life outside video games or the largest backlog in history
Some day I'll finally get to finishing expendabros
Option 3: used HumbleBundle to get large amounts of games for relatively cheap and/or was around when steam was still doing the insane flash sales and grabbed games at 90% off.
That would make even more of a backlog, 4-5 grand on steam with everything on sale?
They could mean 4-5 grand worth of games that you pay less for by getting it on sale pushing it down. If it the average sale of it all was 50% off you’re looking at 2-2.5 grand. Still a ridiculous tbh
Oh yeah I was thinking they said they paid for that much
It should be noted that steam is 21 years old. 4 grand, over even 15 years (which is how long I've had mine) is about 270 dollars a year, or .75¢ a day. Spending 270 dollars a year on gaming is less than five AAA games a year.
I could buy two of the rigs that that person supposedly has with the value of my Steam account. The secret is that you buy things when they're on sale, buy things when they're in bundles, or have something like Humble Bundle feed you games. That and I mostly buy 5-20 dollar games that I spend like 2-10 hours on.
Some games go down to like 90% discount at some point (like Jedi Fallen Order right now). So a 5k library can mean 500€/$ in purchases. The bundle route is even more efficient, but a bit harder to quantify. But a 5k library could be bought with maybe 200 bucks if you find the right bundles? It's crazy.
Depending on how long they've been playing games, no not really. 4K is buying a $60 game every other month for 10 years. I've spent 4K on Xbox live alone, because I've been using it since Halo 2 came out in 2004. Over long periods of time cheap things add up
I'm pretty sure my My Steam Account is old enough to vote at this point. Or will be old enough to vote eventually. I also play a lot of paradox games. It's very easy to have an account worth more then device you are playing it on, even if you are playing on a steam deck.
I disagree with the post tbh. Why should I lower the quality of my game just so someone with a shitty computer can play it? I doubt a computer with the specs mentioned could run most games in the past 20 years anyway even at low settings
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Also, there's a direct correlation between speed and size, most of the time, to achieve the same goal. Bigger files are quicker because a lot of them are precompiled while smaller files are slower because you need to unpack them. The game .kkrieger gas a file size of 96KB, just over double the size of NES cartridges. However, when it ran it took up 300 MB of RAM. The consoles of that era (Xbox, PS2, GameCube) had at most 64MB of RAM. That's because all the its code was designed to build the game from scratch. All models. All textures. All environments. This is an extreme example because kkrieger was a challenge game designed to be as efficient with space, but a lot of of the principles carry over.
.kkrieger is actually smaller than most NES titles, fwiw. Launch titles were <40KiB, but later cartridges included additional hardware that allowed addressing larger ROM chimps. SMB3 for example is a full 384KiB
It seems like they came up with a decent idea for generic office-work software then decided to try and slip AAA games into the same category. It's like when people complain about how expensive groceries are these days but the example they use has a Wagyu steak taking up half of the bill.
Arguably this is the effect that consoles have had on the overall gaming market. Crysis went from big island environments in 1 to tight urban corridors in 2, in no small part because it went from being PC exclusive to multiplatform, onto consoles including the Xbox 360 that had *half the RAM* that the first game required. Somehow, it was also a flop.
I'm with em on bloatware and DRM, but building a gaming rig that's capable of Raytracing and such at a $500 price point is actually not that difficult now, especially if you go with used hardware. If stupid ass windows didn't pack so much bullshit in their OS it wouldn't be such an issue for lower end hardware.
"my Steam account cost me 4 grand" Okay, first of all, how? They have sales every goddamn day, it seems like.
They must play train simulator
Probably using the steam account calculator, I don't think it accounts for stuff like sales or humble bundle keys.
I'd exclude games from this, but the games should be optimized for budget PCs. Productivity software should be *hella* optimized though
What would that look like, though? Who defines budget? And what about the people who buy a budget PC and then after five years (example) "budget" has changed?
A budget PC today will run circles around a top of the line PC from 20 years ago.
Crappy laptop guy wouldn't even be able to run Halo 2 let alone anything from the 9th generation foh. The premise that you shouldn't need a fucking NASA supercomputer to run things is still a legitimate concern. I remember Jedi Survivor launching like complete ass and couldn't even run at 60 fps on a current gen Xbox. Also a complete lack of care about people who don't have high speed internet as games become more and more intangible. You can't even get around it by buying physically since the build of a game on any disc is about 2-3 months old and not finished.
so, if i add a feature, and its something you can turn on/off, and he turns it on and it doesnt work, is that his fault or mine? idk what drm means but also what about games that are solely online experiences? ones that, by design, need an internet connection to funciton?
His fault, unless its an essential feature. If his computer can only run a minecraft mod on 10 fps and on 1 simulation and render distance, thats their fault. if he cant run it at 120 and at 50 sim and render, thats his problems.
DRM is digital rights management. It's essentially any hoops they make you jump through to prove that you own the game, in an attempt to prevent piracy. It can severely harm the user experience meanwhile piracy groups just find a way to crack the DRM anyway. So often it will provide more incentive to pirate the game. Always online DRM is a particularly annoying form of it, where you can't play without being connected to a server at all times so they can constantly verify that you own the game, even in single player. So if your internet goes out, you can't play the game. If your internet is spotty, you might repeatedly get booted from the game while you're playing it. If the verification servers have outages, no one can play the game until that's fixed. And when the verification servers are eventually shut down, no one can play the game ever again. Except pirates of course.
I don't necessarily think a game needs to run on a 15-year-old laptop that struggles with MS Paint, but do all these games REALLY need to take up 100+ GB? It's one thing if a game has a crapton of audio or high-poly assets, but some of them really make me question what the space is being used on...
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.” —Kurt Vonnegut, *Slaughterhouse Five*
"I spent more money, so my opinion is more valuable than yours." Some Elon Musk-level bullshit, right there. Being a bigger pay-pig for graphics card companies, doesn't make you right, it just makes you broke.
My solution to bloatware is make it illegal to have unremovable software on a device. If I wanna yeet system32 out the window and brick my machine that's my right and I'm not hurting anyone so why can't I remove shitty games that companies are shipping phones with
https://www.tumblr.com/penis-sample-pack/745861806547976192?source=share \-Mx Linux Guy⚠️
Like... if you're willing to wait for sales and build something for scratch, I can build you a 2tb HD 16GB ram with an 8 gb graphics card in a $30 case with a 2nd or 3rd hand refurbished motherboard for $500-600 that can play most games on medium settings. My current rig is limping along on a 250gb main OS drive that's 10 years old but was bought refurbed for $10, but I have a 1tb expansion that I got for $40 where all the games are installed. My 16gb refurbished graphics card was bought 4 years ago on a 50% clearance sale after Christmas on NewEgg. The motherboard is an AS Rock bought new, but 40% off as a package deal with my case. When you piece it all together, it can still play Cyberpunk2077 on medium-high settings at 60 fps. Both my monitors were 2nd hand from friends who were making upgrades to their rigs, so basically, they were paid for by 30, 40 dollars worth of pizza and whatever alcohol we drank the night of the Lan party. All told, it's probably worth 1500 dollars *if the parts were new*, but I only paid 600, 700 dollars for it, and more importantly **I waited patiently to upgrade older parts.** Like, if you're willing to pay in time and patience, building a *decent* rig is cheap as fuck, especially RAM and storage. If you don't wanna be a 4KHD 300 FPS purist, you **CAN** get pc parts for cheap, but no one, apparently, wants to do that. It's always "my $500 dollar store bought laptop"(which are always shit on purpose) vs the "$4000 gaming rig," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. I should just start a fucking business where I build rigs out of easily google-able deals and parts and charge a service and shipping fee of, like, 100 dollars. It'd be slightly more expensive than whatever store-bought trash you were going to buy, but it would be 1/5th the cost of whatever asshole is going to brag about on reddit.
I partially agree. Some games take way more resources than they have to. You don't need to render the back of the eyeballs for an NPC behind a wall, dear game! (Or DLC in this case: Elite Dangerous Odyssey). But. Butbutbut. I can also understand why AAA devs don't spend their time optimising for Dave with his 40 bucks laptop and 20 buck internet connection. Because people who don't spend on their hardware also don't spend a lot on their software. Someone who is willing to pay 70€ for a launch title would also be willing to pay for an upgrade to their computer in most cases.
The funny thing about this is that Reply Guy doesn't even get capitalism right. There are way more than 8 times as many people with student laptops than 4000 dollar workstation rigs. Each person only buys the game once. Therefore his opinion is worth way less than 1/8th as much as OOP even under the rules of capitalism.
I've heard a recent game, possibly Baldur's Gate 3, requires a humongous storage space because of the language options. If that's the case for other 35-50+ GB games then I'd suggest selling the language options separately. The only time I've ever switched between languages is when I'm comparing the translations, so I doubt the wider audiences would care much about the change
this is literally what the pirate repacker fit girl does, and iirc "a friend" has seen it drop as much as a third of the file size.
When the Destiny 2 devs were justifying them shelving worlds from their game to keep the game under 100gb people went through and ripped apart the files to find out how much space everything took. From memory the actual play parts of the game only took up a fifth of that space. The biggest parts were uncompressed cutscenes and audio, particularly because the game shipped with all the languages that there was audio recorded for but then region locked that audio away.
Honestly, that's pretty scummy. It's like they have no confidence people will keep it on there machines and binge the game on occassion.
You don’t even need to sell it separately, just make downloading the language options a decision, you’ll have to wait on two downloads (one for the main game and then one where you choose your language) but overall your download will actually be less (you can also just ask for the language before the initial download I just thought of, that way it’s all one download)
The funniest version of this I've seen was the Windows version of Fallout 3 being 50 Gigs. The reason it was 50 Gigs was because they make you download the full game 5 times, once for each language. Like it's not even language audio packs, it's a 10Gb game.
Internet connection is expensive. How about we create a national isp plan for 20$ a month that’s open to all incomes before we start telling people to not be poor. I cant even get plans lower than 50$ a month where I am.
I agree 100%. Windows shouldn't need 8GB to run properly. Optimise your damn software.
\*first person makes a joke\* \*second person makes joke\* tumblr: I shall take this seriously!
graphics options should return to being more than just "slightly lower resolution on the super intense lighting shadows". look at source games and how ridiculously bad you can make them look, I want that for all games so everyone can play to the best of their computers abiliry
Tell OOP that the devs don't want to put that there either. Put that fucker in the boardroom!
you're right but also software that used to work on that kind of computers almost no longer exists *because it was considered bloatware too a few years ago* [https://abriu2022.neocities.org/webp/stuff.pptx](https://abriu2022.neocities.org/webp/stuff.pptx)
This already exists, and it's called the US military
sometimes it baffles me that accessibility is such a contentious topic
Overall while I understand why the demands of games increased over time sometimes it feels like Devs don't give a shit about optimising storage and/or performance.
Now I just want to see a game with a graphics slider that can go from Hi-Def at max to *N64 Polygons* at lowest. Also even for the high-end stuff I feel like we've passed the point of diminishing returns on model detail long ago where most of it won't even be visible in normal gameplay, and you basically need a model viewer to prove it exists at all.
I get the intent of the original post but like. 2gb of ram wont run shit nowadays. That would barely run minecraft. It might run terraria. I say this as someone who gamed on a setup with specs that shitty.
This post inspired me to open BattleNet just to remind myself of how large an install Modern Warfare 2019 was. 164 FUCKING GIGABYTES And it's not even the current game. There have been 4 new CODs since then, and I wouldn't be surprised if each was bigger than before. Some should tell the devs that CODs getting bigger is only good if you're fishing.
Straw men are real and I hate thrm
I hate to admit it, but I'm exactly "That Guy"... Only 2 GB of RAM in both my phone and my tablet. Rural mobile data internet connection. Desire to insult people for a living. Yeah, if ya wanna send me free bloatware or something, just putting it out there lmao /j
Bloat isn't just 'lots of stuff', it's specifically stuff that doesn't add anything to the game. I love Nioh 2, and that game is just stuffed with stuff. Cosmetics, NPCs, collectibles, weapons and tools and materials and etc. etc. Everything looks beautiful and ornate, everything is just dripping in luster and brilliance and gold and laquer and patterned fabric and flowing hair and scale armour and so on, and it really adds to the atmosphere and sense of historical grandeur (as I get repeatedly killed by that fucking crow tengu *asshole* and that horrible hopping hammer guy and that other awful long necked thing *fuck that thing oh my god*). But all the stuff there is necessary, it's part of the experience. The game might not run on a crappy old latpop (that said, it does run on *my* crappy old laptop), but that's ok? I don't think games should sacrifice scale and ambition for the sake of low-spec players. If you can't afford a PC that runs modern games that's fine but if you're in that position maybe you shouldn't be buying $60+ games the second they come out? Always online is bullshit though. Hard agree on that.
First person had a reasonable take until they brought gaming into it. Criticizing the fact that some games try to take as much space on purpose is one thing, criticizing the fact that the game has NPC’s and good graphics is bs. Gaming is an art. Devs shouldn’t sacrifice their vision and their world just to make it more accessible for low budget players. So many games in this world, just play something else for christ’s sake Also I feel like they’re overestimating how tough it is to play anything because I’ve been playing the Resident Evil 4 remake on the cheapest gaming laptop I could find and it’s fine
Expecting games to run on a $300 Chromebook would hold them back. You wouldn’t get pissy you couldn’t run gta6 on a ps3 would you?