Jake vs. Game Size

I'll be honest, my situation is probably not very common. I live outside of Kansas City in a place that's pretty much on the edge of suburban and rural. There's totally a field full of cows across from my (well, my parents) house. My road was gravel up until 6 years ago. There's about an acre in-between us and our neighbor's houses. I was extremely, and I mean extremely lucky that I found our current broadband provider when I was about 14 years old. I was in the middle of convincing my mother to get HughesNet Satellite (I didn't know any better) when my friend down the street told me about this new fixed wireless ISP that just spread to our area. They were cheaper, and advertised the same speed as HughesNet. Their latency was also much much better than beaming a signal into space would have been. That opened me up to the world of gaming, on a 1.0mbps broadband speed. That's megabits, not megabytes. So in browser download speed language that's about 125kB/s. Yeah, pretty slow compared to what you probably have right now.

It's quite magical really. That download speed is just enough to download a full-size game from Steam in about 3 days (or 1 day overnight if I was lucky). Sure, I lagged about 30% of the time while I was playing. I actually expected lag every time I sat down to play, whether it was immediately or an hour or so into my gaming session. It became a part of my gaming - not that I enjoyed it. Over time, after many email exchanges with my ISP, I learned a lot about my home networking and ways to optimize my latency. If other people use the internet at the same time it would cause me to have unplayable lag until they stopped. Peak hours were always unpredictable. I can't play any multiplayer games which have matches that last longer than 20 minutes. Dota 2 and LoL were a total nightmare. If I made it through the entire game without lag then it was considered a miracle.

Now the "next generation" is upon us, yet my internet speed remains the same. The Elder Scrolls Skyrim, a game which released toward the end of the last generation of consoles, is about 13GB unpacked and 6GB to download. That's totally manageable. 6GB at 1mbps takes about 14 hours. That's a decent overnight download for me, with enough time to preload the entire game before it even released. It's not exactly heaven by most people's standards, but it was just fine for me. Most games were like that.

That brings me to now. Let's look at Max Payne 3 for example. This released not long after Elder Scrolls in May of the following year. The download size for Max Payne 3 is 30GB over Steam. That's five times larger than Skyrim. 66 hours of straight downloading. That's 2 days and 18 hours. "But Jake," you might say. "You said you were fine with three days of downloads, like, two paragraphs ago." Keep in mind that "three days of downloads" usually means I download one game when my family and I are not using the internet over the course of three days. I have to do it like that, otherwise it would be a heavy burden and annoyance for the rest of my family. If you try to get on the internet while a Steam download is running in my house then you'd be lucky if you got Google.com to load. So I normally run them while we're all sleeping, which is about eight hours a night. So a game that would take one day of straight downloading becomes a game that takes three. Max Payne, then, becomes a week-long download. Imagine my reaction when I bought this game on Steam and saw that it required 30GB of space on my hard-drive. To this day, I have never played Max Payne 3. This is purely because I have never found the time to devote to downloading it.

The newest release (at the time of this posting) is Wolfenstein: The New Order. A game with decent reviews and a seemingly alright story, right? Guess I'll never play it since it's... 43GB. That's almost 100 hours at my internet speed. That's almost two weeks of actual download time between me purchasing this game and being able to play it. That's just completely outside the realm of plausibility for me. This game, which I could easily pick up in a future Steam sale while I'm on a shopping spree after a holiday bonus, has become unpurchasable for me. I'm not going to spend two entire weeks downloading a first-person nazi shooter. I'm sorry Hitler, but someone else is going to have to stop you.

It appears that this is a new trend for all next-gen games. It's not as much of a problem if I get a next-gen console, because then I could just go out and buy a copy of whatever I want. You know, in that old disc format thing. DVD I think it's called? I would actually still buy my games in disc format if I could. The last one I bought was Bioshock Infinite from Amazon, although I didn't particularly enjoy that game. Before that it was Dishonored from Walmart. Blizzard can still be relied upon for their discs being available in stores as well. There's still the minor obstacle of telling the old lady in the electronics section that I want the Windows version.

"The one in the window? Which platform?"

"No no no, I mean the WINDOWS version. The PC version."

"Oh like a computer? I don't think we have that."

"Could you check the back? It said online that you do."

It was then a 50/50 chance of whether or not she actually looked or if she just gave up when she saw the pile of boxes in the back room. I felt a little bad for her. I mean I was probably like the only person who ever shows up on release day looking for a PC copy. I'm surprised they even keep PC copies to be honest.

So the point of this entire post is not that I want developers to make smaller games (although that'd be nice... for me) but that I just wish developers would be more optimized. I mean what exactly in Call of Duty: Ghosts, for example, warrants that game being 40GB? Have you seen that damn thing? It looks exactly like every other Call of Duty game, and it's optimized shit poorly. Some people say "it's because the textures aren't compressed" but I'll tell you what, I'm not seeing much of an improvement over those uncompressed textures than the ones they had in their previous games. Then you get games like Titanfall, where there is literally 35GB of audio files which are mostly made up of the same versions in different languages. It's nice that they've localized for all sorts of languages, but dear lord, is there no way to maybe figure out what language the gamer will be playing in and maybe only including that language instead of every language at once? It's called optimization! I mean, this isn't just for me. A lot of people don't want a game taking up 35GB of unnecessary space on their hard drive either.

To some it's about hard drive space, to others it's about download time. Please, could you optimize your games? Pretty please? I just don't want next gen to be defined by the size of their rars. I kind of don't want to have to buy a laptop and drive to a google fiberhood looking for unsecured wifi every time a game I really want comes out, and I also don't want to clear out 20 last-gen games for every next-gen game that I download to my hard-drive.

There are things that can be done to allow gamers with limited bandwidth resources easier access to games. Split out the localization into separate packages, set high-res textures into an optional download, partition out levels to let you start before all the content is downloaded.

It does however come down to a cost/benefit trade off. Adding extra options might confuse/frustrate players who don't understand why they should have to do multiple downloads to get the full experience or worse not understand that the muddy textures are not the intended visual fidelity of the game.

However, it definitely sucks to have such long downloads even with the few games that have pre-load options. In regions with download limits with overcharges a 40gb game could cost the game's price again in download overages.

The best fix for now is to use school/work/public location to download large files to portable storage and then transfer it to your computer.

Then let the game devs know that they would get a much happier paying customer if they offered a low bandwidth version.

The worst thing about Wolfenstein is that even if you buy the boxed copy (Like I did) you still have a huge download. After installing all four of the discs it told me that only 70% was installed, I then spent half a day downloading the rest of the game. Most of the people probably buying the physical version at this point are doing so due to their download speeds. I'd happily download all of the PC games through steam if it was a viable option, but shit like that borders on the unacceptable.

@gunstarred: That's my worst nightmare right there.

I remember I bought the digital version of Guild Wars 2 and it was about a 20GB download (which was big at the time). I paid $60 for it online, and if I would have purchased the retail copy it would have also been $60 and I wouldn't be wasting so much bandwidth downloading it. I put in a support ticket for a refund explaining I wanted to buy the discs instead but they were so backed up with hacker requests that it never went through.

I believe there was a game that came out recently (like within the last year) that was basically just a download code? I remember people saying they had to download the entire game and that the disc was next to useless. I forget the title of the game, but I avoided it at all costs.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat you are, same connection speed. I was thinking earlier today about how much time I might spend downloading a game versus how much time I might spend actually playing it. Oh well!

Also, on a connection like that, it's really awesome to have a download get messed up and need to start again. For example, I bought Brutal Legend on PC before launch. I believe it had a pre-load and several patches both before and just after launch. I think the game was around 15gb and because downloading that much on 1mb/s would take about 30 hours, I didn't download it in one go, as not to totally tie up the internet for everyone during the day. The problem was that on maybe three separate occasions, when I went to resume the download, it started again from 0. I believe it was doing this when I paused/resumed after a new patch had been released, but I ended up downloading about 40gb of Brutal Legend. Uncool. I'm pretty sure this was before Steam actually had the ability to control how much bandwidth etc it was using, so that wasn't an option.

I also backed the Carmageddon: Reincarnation kickstarter and have that on early access, the initial download was 13gb, and they recently updated the game and it wants to download the entire 13gb again. I can't really afford to do that sort of thing!

@damodar: Strange, actually. Steam is like the only distribution service I've been able to rely on for never having a failed download or making me restart. I've had some interesting problems with it, but not usually involving downloads. Other platforms give me tons of problems.

I almost can't buy a game on Origin now because it gets these "download errors" all the time during downloads and completely interrupts the download until you manually start it again. If Steam runs into a connection issue it just keeps retrying until it can start again, but Origin just stops. When I was downloading Titanfall I had to literally babysit the download and resume it like once an hour. As a result it took forever to download. Everything I've downloaded from Origin has been the same way.

@lunnington: Yeah, I think Brutal Legend is the only time it's happened to me, so I figure it might have something to do with the file structure of the game or something that made steam think that it didn't have any compatible data or something. I checked the forums for the game when it happened and found at least one other person that had the same problem. As for Carmageddon, I don't believe that was a similar error, I think everyone who got the update had to download the entire game again.

Steam definitely makes the prospect of having hundreds of GBs of games that can only be downloaded much less daunting than it otherwise could be. Can't speak to Origin; I've got an account, but I don't believe I've downloaded any of my games yet.

If you can't find it in stores, can't you order the physical copy off of Amazon? Also, wasn't Kansas City the one that got Google Fiber? Why don't you see if you can get that out where you are?

Still, I do agree with you. Wolfenstein was a 40.7 GB download and it was pretty painful on my 3mbps down speed. I pre-ordered it expecting the pre-load to be up a day or more sooner, but nope. It wasn't up until Monday. Games that size should be up for pre-load an entire week before the launch day. I did get to play it by Wednesday, but that's only because I let it download all night and from 8AM to 3:30PM, when there's nobody else around the house. It was totally a great game, by the way, and the story was better than "all right" though nothing mind blowing.

I feel like if you're using a computer than can run games that are this big, then you should be able to understand a series of checkboxes that say "multiple languages" and "high-res textures", even if you didn't build it yourself. But then, if you've got a computer that can play games of this size, then there's a good chance that you can play it with those high res textures so we're back to square one.

There's not many physical copies for a lot of PC games. Also you lose the benefit of games going on sale. Rarely will a physical copy of a game go on sale. I probably won't buy Wolfenstein full price, but I'd buy it in a Steam sale later this year for sure. That is, if I could download it quick enough.

And yes, that's the irony actually. I live 8 miles from Google Fiber and there is literally no better internet than what I have. You have to understand though, Google picked KC because it has probably the worst internet situation in the country compared to every other city. They're trying to make it their before and after picture. I don't know if Fiber will ever make it out to where I live though, mostly because it costs a lot to run fiber out this far and there's honestly few houses which would actually subscribe to it.

Which is why I said "order it off of Amazon". Physical copies of PC games can actually be cheap there. Not Steam sale cheap, but cheaper than you'd think, and there are enough of them to go around.

I do feel the irony, though. I live in a county right next to Charlotte, NC, and they're well on their way to getting Google Fiber too, but we probably won't get it here. It's not as bad for me as it is for you, but internet 'round here is still crap.

@believer258 said:

I agree with you that people should. However first hand evidence has shown me that when it comes to the humans never underestimate a person's ability to be dumb and/or lazy.

@salarn: Besides, they could have had it pre built or gifted to them. Could easily be a $1000 facebook machine. Especially since steam now has support for Macs.