Next-gen games to be 20Gb+ [Archive]

Duoae

09-21-2005, 11:07 AM

I think that's an exaggeration. Does he mean current next gen games (ie the first ones to be released on Xbox 360)? Because they definately aren't. I'm not really sure how he came to this figure.

I don't see a lot of next gen games being spectacular in length. I also see a lot of reused textures overlaid with different shaders to make them different to save on development time and costs. What is taking up this 20 + GB? I could understand 10GB... but 20GB?!!

Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

Micki!

09-21-2005, 11:10 AM

FireFly said:
Well, at least that's the final death of CDs.

Me calling a gamestore: "Hello, i'd like to order The legend of Zelda for Nintendo revoution..."

Gamestore guy: "Alright, wait a sec... That'll be 60$ sir... It'll arrive in your mailbox tommorow... There'll be about 73 Cd's, and 4-5 CD-Manuals... Enjoy..."

*hangs up phone*

Me: "NOOOO!!!" http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif

Karthik

09-21-2005, 11:13 AM

Forgetting about high res textures aren't we?

Twin

09-21-2005, 11:13 AM

i'm sure something like that was said about this generation of games aswell....

the way i see it...a game will be as big as it needs to be, obviously games like wario ware and soul calibur won't be 20GB (i guess) but games like metal gear 4 and zelda will be massive like they've always been so it'll be like it's always been and nobody will beable to tell the difference in my opinion...

*edit

and with sony using bluray i'm guessing that nintendo and microsoft will also use some kind of special dvd which'll hold more than 8gb there won't be any problem with the amounts of dvds unless it's a huge game like the ones i mentioned above...

Logic Bomb

09-21-2005, 11:25 AM

Games that will be 20gb are going to be MAJOR games. Like RPG's with extremely large amounts of voice acting and CGI cut scenes in them. Really i can't see any other reason why they would be that large. Extremely high def textures and models is one way i guess but i don't think we have the tech yet to multiple support stupid-high quality models on screen at the same time do we?

- LB

seregrail7

09-21-2005, 11:32 AM

Don't forget Unreal engine games tend to take up more space than most games.

8IronBob

09-21-2005, 11:33 AM

That oughta be something, considering that most companies are leaning toward the new HD-DVD or Blu-Ray technologies, instead of plain DVD Special Editions, regular DVDs are gonna be the standards, and the Blu-Rays are gonna be the special editions, that's probably what it is. Plus you may need a 160 GB+ HD in order to fit enough games to play (glad I have my 250 GB monster).

crunchy superman

09-21-2005, 11:38 AM

I would guess UT2007 will be this large. UT2004 was around 10, so that's not unreasonable considering how huge those textures are going to be.

Cerberus_e

09-21-2005, 11:39 AM

then we will have singleplayer demo's of 8 GB!
let's hope fiber glass will be popular by then http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Kristian Joensen

09-21-2005, 11:43 AM

Duoae said:
Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

Mark Rein agrees with you.

Kalki

09-21-2005, 11:44 AM

Will this stuff be streaming directly off the blu-rays or hd-dvds? My rig sure can't store all that.

Anyway, next-gen is still a while away for the PC right? Isn't Unreal 3's release around (late) 2006?

Orochi Avlis

09-21-2005, 11:47 AM

Kristian Joensen said:

Duoae said:
Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

Mark Rein agrees with you.

Not all games are going to be 20+ GB.

HL 2 was what? 5 GB?
Before Valve released it, they would allow people to preload the game weeks up to the release. And seeing how fast the internet is getting, I'm sure when UT 2007 is released there will be an accessible and fast connection to handle downloading it.

But, yes I do see the problem that arises due to the size of games.

laffer

09-21-2005, 12:09 PM

That's cool, I hope games become bigger faster than the net becomes faster. That ought to create some trouble for systems like Steam and the incredibly horrible Telltale system http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

FireFly

09-21-2005, 12:21 PM

Duoae said:
Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

They could still be streamed.

8IronBob

09-21-2005, 12:43 PM

Orochi Avlis said:

Kristian Joensen said:

Duoae said:
Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

Mark Rein agrees with you.

Not all games are going to be 20+ GB.

HL 2 was, what, 5 GB.
Before Valve released it, they would allow people to preload the game weeks up to the release. And seeing how fast the internet is getting, I'm sure when UT 2007 is released there will be an accessible and fast connection to handle downloading it.

But, yes I do see the problem that arises due to the size of the game.

Right, and Doom 3 was 2 GB, which was perfectly adequate for most PCs over the last five years to be able to run. 2 GB was the standard FPS minimum for the past 2 - 3 years, if memory starts to serve me correctly. I guess that now may be the time to up it to 10 GB over the course of 2006 - 2007. 5 GB's large enough for today's standards. We shall soon see which way the game minimum specs are going to go in the near future. Of course, I want to be careful about DNF's specs for obvious reasons, but Quake 4, I'm predicting will be rather steep as well. F.E.A.R. sounds like it's going to be just as steep in HD Space. That's up for the company to determine what they feel are the best reqs for today's games.

Hudson

09-21-2005, 12:45 PM

You have to remember that "Internet 2" will eventually be made mainstream.

big fat lazy

09-21-2005, 12:49 PM

Cerberus_e said:
then we will have singleplayer demo's of 8 GB!
let's hope fiber glass will be popular by then http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I think the largest demo I've play so far was the Dungeon Siege 2 SP demo, it was like 1.6gb or something!

Mountain Man

09-21-2005, 02:33 PM

I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

Phayzon

09-21-2005, 03:40 PM

Duoae said:
I think that's an exaggeration. Does he mean current next gen games (ie the first ones to be released on Xbox 360)? Because they definately aren't. I'm not really sure how he came to this figure.

I don't see a lot of next gen games being spectacular in length. I also see a lot of reused textures overlaid with different shaders to make them different to save on development time and costs. What is taking up this 20 + GB? I could understand 10GB... but 20GB?!!

Plus, if games are going to be 20 GB then online downloading will never take off.

In (alot of) time, they eventually be 50~100gb and we'll have ~10tb harddrive and 100Mbyte dl speeds.

avatar_58

09-21-2005, 05:56 PM

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

Yep, I used to think that those games were huge. Now its just a dent in the standard 100+gb harddrives of today.

I think this is a tad exaggerated though, because 20gb compared to a max of 5 right now? Why the big leap? Oh well, I guess this is just another arguement for blue ray discs. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

@laffer - You and I deviously thought the same thing upon read those comments...hehe http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Mongorian

09-21-2005, 07:55 PM

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

Seems like yesterday http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Back on topic, lets keep in mind Mark is a sort of mix between John Romero and a guy who says too much.

Nacho

09-21-2005, 08:22 PM

I'm really not ready for another format war. I'm still converting to DVD's.

ZuljinRaynor

09-21-2005, 08:50 PM

20Gbs? Maybe for console games that they are too lazy to compress.

avatar_58

09-21-2005, 08:51 PM

ZuljinRaynor said:
20Gbs? Maybe for console games that they are too lazy to compress.

Well considering the PS3 uses blue ray they probably won't compress anything. Laziness really..

ZuljinRaynor

09-21-2005, 09:00 PM

Hehe, if you only knew true lazyness. In aim I type the URLs so I can click there instead of clicking IE and typing the URL. That's lazy.
But yeah, I wonder how big its San Andreas uncompressed.

dreweth

09-21-2005, 10:14 PM

Mongorian said:

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

Seems like yesterday http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Back on topic, lets keep in mind Mark is a sort of mix between John Romero and a guy who says too much.

I snorted my milk you *****.

Simon Charles

09-21-2005, 10:42 PM

AlienAssKicker

09-21-2005, 10:51 PM

Permadeath said:
says Mark Rein

""Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them," Mark Rein, VP & Co-founder, Epic Games"

http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10606&filter=

19.995 gigs of graphics and 5.12 megabytes of gameplay. No thank you, I'll pass.

Karthik

09-22-2005, 01:38 AM

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

That's nothing compared to Blade Runner which had a maximum installation size of 1.5GB and that was in 1997.

8IronBob

09-22-2005, 07:32 AM

Karthik said:

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

That's nothing compared to Blade Runner which had a maximum installation size of 1.5GB and that was in 1997.

Yeah, back in those days, your hard drive would almost go kaboom on ya, since not too many HDs even ran at that size. As a matter of fact on my Win 95 desktop that I bought at the end of 1995, or beginning of 1996, it only had a 1 GB HD w/ 16 MB RAM, Intel Pentium 133 MHz, and maybe integrated graphics (not certain). However, I thought that was massive when Windows 95 came about. Right now, it's a nothing PC just sitting in the attic. It would hardly ever play Quake II or HL1 if I wanted to. I can see that 1997 was a tough year for most. Right now, I have no big concerns about HD space or RAM. Almost ten years later, HDs are about 100+ GB, 512 MB+ RAM, 128 MB+ graphics, Movie Theater-quality sound cards, DVD -ROMs and DVD Burners, and that's far better than anything from 1997. I was lucky to have a CD-ROM that even went at 8x with that old grump PC. Now a DVD burner is 16x, which was at 8x last year. You gotta love what everyone's doing, and I have no complaints. Just gotta throw away the past, and look to the next-gen PCs and the games they'll be running.

Nessus

09-22-2005, 08:19 AM

20 gigs! I think I'm going to click to load up the level and the go eat dinner or something. Level loads are going to start taking a Loooong time.

Mountain Man

09-22-2005, 08:20 AM

Mongorian said:
lets keep in mind Mark is a sort of mix between John Romero and a guy who says too much.

So he's like a mix between John Romero and...John Romero?

8IronBob

09-22-2005, 08:42 AM

Mountain Man said:

Mongorian said:
lets keep in mind Mark is a sort of mix between John Romero and a guy who says too much.

So he's like a mix between John Romero and...John Romero?

Hehe, well said, well said... Yeah...

However, I would like to hear what John Carmack says about this when it comes to games that id Software would like to do. You know what he was looking at with Doom 3, and now he's coming up with something original from what I hear. You gotta stay back and let Carmack go all out on his plans. Not only that, but as I said, I'm gonna be careful with DNF and Prey when it comes to 3DR's games, because even tho they said specs were going to be steep, when it comes to HD Space, that's something that they probably have under lock and key at this point.

Duoae

09-23-2005, 10:23 AM

Karthik said:
Forgetting about high res textures aren't we?

No. I don't think Enemy Territory Quake Wars will be above 10 GB and that's suppose to have hi res textures (although i can't remember if they're procedurally generated or not?) not to mention HL2 and Doom 3/quake 4/ Prey.... how hi res are you talking here? There is a point where the monitor and human eye can no longer display/see the difference. Plus the graphics cards could never load that much into memory..... and the amount of time an artist would have to make that texture? I doubt that cost effectiveness/time would ever tally against the diminishing returns gained from display.
Let's face it 20GB is an exaggeration for this whole next gen.

crunchy superman said:
I would guess UT2007 will be this large. UT2004 was around 10, so that's not unreasonable considering how huge those textures are going to be.

Are you including mods there?!! My UT2k4 installation was around 4-5 GB maximum.

Orochi Avlis said:
Not all games are going to be 20+ GB.

HL 2 was what? 5 GB?

That's what i was thinking.... though i can't see any games being that big (20GB) in the next generation (yes, i know i keep saying it) - especially with compression. A lot of future work will have generated textures rather than artistically drawn pictures. It makes more cost-time sense...

FireFly said:
They could still be streamed.

I wasn't really thinking of streaming problems... more the chaos all the extra bandwidth required would have on the internet. For instance, no company that had less than a 20-40GB download limit would ever have business and bandwidth would become a very expensive commodity. I don't know if you're at university or not, but you should know the effect of a few file sharers taking movies or somesuch on the speed of local connections. Well, imagine that for everyone who played a game. Imagine for the first one to two weeks of a game's release whole networks performing slowly because of the massive amount of "constant" (computers might get switched off, but i wouldn't if i was waiting for a d/l) traffic.

Phayzon said:
In (alot of) time, they eventually be 50~100gb and we'll have ~10tb harddrive and 100Mbyte dl speeds.

Hehe, i'll believe it when i see it.... or maybe not as i might be dead http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

IwantMORE

09-23-2005, 10:56 AM

Hi-rez textures could be 10-25M each
7 channel audio another 10M per minute
DVD quality cutscenes 50M per minute

Not hard to get those figures up to 20G

Dave-ros

09-23-2005, 01:00 PM

So just as we're leaving the days when games came on as many as 5 CD-ROMs http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mryuck.gif, we could be approaching the days where they come on 5 DVD-ROMs? http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Karthik

09-23-2005, 01:19 PM

IwantMORE said:
Hi-rez textures could be 10-25M each
7 channel audio another 10M per minute
DVD quality cutscenes 50M per minute

Not hard to get those figures up to 20G

I thought audio mixing can be done using EAX and DirectSound? Why store 7.1 sound formats then?

Kristian Joensen

09-23-2005, 01:26 PM

IwantMORE said:
Hi-rez textures could be 10-25M each
7 channel audio another 10M per minute
DVD quality cutscenes 50M per minute

Not hard to get those figures up to 20G

Yes and here you are even ignoring Models, Animations, Levels and Code.

These ertainly aren't getting any smaller.

Night Hacker

09-23-2005, 01:31 PM

Mountain Man said:
I can remember when I thought Half-Life's 450MB install size was massive.

I still remember when I thought DOOM's 16 Megs was huge. Heck, it seems like yesterday I remember being amazed that we actually had 1GIG Hard drives and 1GHz CPUs. Now a single game takes up that much space.

I rendered a 3D image the other day and it was saved as a BMP my default. I think the image size was something like 6Megs. It occurred to me just how large that was when I thought back to the DOS days when en entire game was less than that. I have a folder with just a couple renders in it and some files saved that they were rendered from and it is 634Megs, larger than my hard drive I had back then. And the images are in JPG format! heh.

We have come SO far in such a short period of time. I wouldn't be surprised if games went to 20 gigs, heck, in 10 years they went from 16Megs to over a gig! But I think we'll have hard drives to hold it and new DVDs. My internet has went from 250K/sec to up to 800K/sec in a few short years for me on cable, so I wouldn't be surprised if that sped up alot more as well.

Look at video cards. They went from having a massive 16Megs of video to a small 128Megs! 16megs was a large amount, I remember one game that warned that you needed at least 8megs of video, 8 MEGS! Heh, 16 megs was alot, now 128 isn't enough. System RAM is the same, 64 MEGS was plenty, now people have 1 to 2 GIGS in their system.

It really boggles my mind when I think how far we have come in such a short time. And I'm not looking back all that long ago. If you think back to the C64 days, it was a 1MHz machine with 64K of memory and 16 colours, floppy disks for it held up to 160K! heh. And that was only 20 years ago.

Then there's the transfer speeds... hehehe... I had a 1200 Baud modem for my C64, that's what, 120 BYTES per second and it was faster than my friends 300baud (30 BYTES per second!!!)

laffer

09-23-2005, 01:43 PM

Hehe, I remember the first time a friend of mine told me about this new thing called CD ROM.. and that one CD could hold more than 600 megabytes! I didn't believe him at all, and I was shocked to find out later that he was telling the truth! Back then, one CD was quite a lot bigger than most hard drives http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I used to think a game on four DD floppies (that's floppies with 720 kb storage capacity for the PC, the Amiga was able to use more though). You can tell the difference as there is only one hole in DD disks while in HD disks there are 2.
Btw, if you make an extra hole at the right spot on DD disks, they "become" HD disks with double the storage space. I don't think it's good for the floppy though.

Night Hacker

09-23-2005, 03:17 PM

Before Commodore went bankrupt, they were trying to get enough money to build their CD-TVs. They had ALOT of interest in this new and unique idea where you could get a game on CD (unheard of at the time) and put it in this console that would hook up to your TV set and you could play it. But you could also hook up a keyboard and floppy drive etc.. and use it as an Amiga computer.

They had ALOT of interest and I still think if they had been able to build the units and ship it they wouldn't have went bankrupt.

Image that, games on CDs using a console you hook up to a TV, what will they think of next. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

LeadBullet

09-24-2005, 01:36 AM

Hudson said:
You have to remember that "Internet 2" will eventually be made mainstream.

Yeah, but when?

avatar_58

09-24-2005, 01:38 AM

laffer said:
Btw, if you make an extra hole at the right spot on DD disks, they "become" HD disks with double the storage space. I don't think it's good for the floppy though.

I heard this before, it was almost like they deliberatly made the disks hold less until they decided to release DD disks (which they wanted to be more expensive)

Karthik

09-25-2005, 08:31 PM

Back then programmers were thrifty when it comes to space. They used to use alot of compression. Today, they don't give wooden nickle. The only people who still use compression are those in "th3 s3cn3".

Night Hacker

09-25-2005, 10:48 PM

avatar_58 said:

laffer said:
Btw, if you make an extra hole at the right spot on DD disks, they "become" HD disks with double the storage space. I don't think it's good for the floppy though.

I heard this before, it was almost like they deliberatly made the disks hold less until they decided to release DD disks (which they wanted to be more expensive)

Actually, notching a DD disk to make it HD wasn't a very good idea, at least not to store data on reliably. When they made HD disks they tested both sides, disks with one side that didn't test so well were made DD, others that tested fine on both sides were HD.

I have notched plenty of disks that ended up with errors on the bad side and stopped doing that and stuck with HD disks only.

The odd disk worked, but it was very unreliable and I only used notched disks for stuff I didn't care about using and only when I was out of HD disks.

Karthik said:
Back then programmers were thrifty when it comes to space. They used to use alot of compression. Today, they don't give wooden nickle. The only people who still use compression are those in "th3 s3cn3".

You just touched on one of my complaints these days about games. It seems that nobody cares about space anymore. I have seen programs with TGAs and BMPs in folders, that is NUTS, they are huge. Then you get folders with tons of tiny little files, they waste alot of space. On your hard drive there is a minimum block size. If you're block size is as small as 4K, and these days that is common, but it can be up to 32K in size. Than that is the MINIMUM space a file will take up. So a 1K file actually takes up 4K and wastes 3K! That's 3 times it's size wasted. When you got hundreds or thousands of tiny files, it really adds up. And of course, windows has lots of small files. The best way to store them is just to put them all in one large data file, it doesn't even have to be compressed to save space. When I create a game (my Deluxe Pacman game for example) I put all my data into one compressed data file.

I wish they would get back to watching their space usage, it's getting out of hand. my 120G HD is almost full and I don't know why. I uninstalled all my largest games and only freed up about 5Gigs!

Karthik

09-26-2005, 12:19 AM

Wow, didn't know that. Is that why Doom 3 is stored in uncompressed PK files?

gungriffon geona

09-26-2005, 11:35 AM

AlienAssKicker said:
19.995 gigs of graphics and 5.12 megabytes of gameplay. No thank you, I'll pass.

I can easily believe that right there. games these days hype graphics too much. I just want a FUN game. no "graphics/physics/shit so good it'll make your eyes bleed", just a fun game that will be worth my time to actually play for 20+ hours for the first run through, then want to play again later.

Edit:
And what about us who can't afford to buy the newest "ZOMG EXTR3M3!" hardware? what will happen to us? they are ALIENATING the majority of gamers by using uncompressed files and hardware-killing graphics. It's not right, it's a crime against gamers if you ask me.

Dr. Kill

09-26-2005, 12:04 PM

gungriffon geona said:
And what about us who can't afford to buy the newest "ZOMG EXTR3M3!" hardware? what will happen to us? they are ALIENATING the majority of gamers by using uncompressed files and hardware-killing graphics. It's not right, it's a crime against gamers if you ask me.

Those of us that can't afford an ultra expensive pc will buy consoles for a fraction of the price. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif That's what I do. I hate pc gaming cause the hardware requirements keep going up every second. There is no standard, so those that can't afford a $5000 pc are left in the dust. You're right, the industry screws us, but it's our own damn fault. If they made games look less good, I know I, and many others would bitch "wtf, this looks like N64 graphics!".

8IronBob

09-26-2005, 12:17 PM

That's right, I could care less if the game uses the old Quake 2, or Quake 3-style tech, Unreal tech, heck, even Build again, just as long as they put together something with that fun, and wow factor, then I'm in. I could care less about the tech that's used, just as long as the fun gameplay is there, and the storyline is one that'll wow me, and everything else. Too much advanced technology, then the HD storage goes through the roof. That's not right, IMHO. Just have the right amount of features to make the game cool, and a storyline, and all the good stuff with weapons and ability to make your own maps with the greatest of ease. That's all that really matters to me.

gungriffon geona

09-26-2005, 12:48 PM

Dr. Kill said:

gungriffon geona said:
And what about us who can't afford to buy the newest "ZOMG EXTR3M3!" hardware? what will happen to us? they are ALIENATING the majority of gamers by using uncompressed files and hardware-killing graphics. It's not right, it's a crime against gamers if you ask me.

Those of us that can't afford an ultra expensive pc will buy consoles for a fraction of the price. http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif That's what I do. I hate pc gaming cause the hardware requirements keep going up every second. There is no standard, so those that can't afford a $5000 pc are left in the dust. You're right, the industry screws us, but it's our own damn fault. If they made games look less good, I know I, and many others would bitch "wtf, this looks like N64 graphics!".

bitch about graphics? that's a riot right there. seriously, to me, as long as they don't look like they were produced by an untalented 8 year old I'm completely fine with graphics that look a little dated.