Want to install this? Hope you have (checks notes...) 340 gigs of SSD space

I saw this news item and had to kind of stop and admire the thought process behind whatever's happening here.

According to the reviewer’s guide that accompanied last week’s press preview event, Above and Beyond also requires even more space for the initial installation. More than 340 GB of storage is required to download, unpack, and install the game files. The developer tells Polygon that owners won’t need to maintain that much free space once the game is initially installed, since future updates won’t be nearly that large.

I, uh...dunno about that. I'm unclear about what could possibly be happening with the install here where you need double the amount of final storage space for the installer than the actual game takes up. Generally game files are compressed and expanded upon install, meaning you can get away with smaller download sizes than install sizes (at least that was the case in the DVD era; not sure if many publishers bother with this for digital releases). In an era where stuff like Fortnite and Destiny are actively trying to decrease their install size, though, I guess you have to give them credit for not really giving a shit.

Also, a 2080 as a minimum video card?

Sounds like the whole game needs to copy itself during the install process for some reason. This is similar to an issue PS4 users have faced forever. For some reason, every patch on PS4 requires the entire game to be reinstalled during a lengthy process the system simply calls copying. It resulted in hilariously annoying scenarios where a 10 MB patch for a 50 GB game required 50 GB of free hard drive space.

Not sure why this is happening with Medal of Honor, but it seems like a similar issue.

Yeah, definitely reeks of the unpacking model although I would be curious what the download size is versus the install footprint since it ends up at 177 GB in the end.

Part of me wonders if this is some side effect of the oculus ecosystem reminiscent of that weird binary/installer format the windows store uses (used to use?) that sandboxed stuff and screwed with lots of third party apps. Part of it was locking things down and part of it was (allegedly?) an attempt to provide the same environment as the xbox to make maintaining different ports easier.

Although no idea why you would not prioritize footprint on an internal storage device like a quest.

I was really looking forward to playing this but I "only" have a 1080. I didn't think I'd see a game that card can't play this soon.

There's already such a high barrier of entry to play the game in the first place. This is absolutely nuts.

Serious question here, but are any big developers seriously pushing hard against data caps in any regard? Or is it just someone else's problem?

@sparky_buzzsaw: Publicly? Not to my knowledge. I know Digital Extremes/Warframe has been releasing the "ensmallening" patches to shrink the size of that game on PC but... it is already tiny relative to other live games. Not sure if Destiny 2 disney vaulting stuff has had any appreciable impact on filesize.

Behind the scenes? You can bet that Valve and Google and the like have been talking with various ISPs to get a whitelist in a similar way as how Netflix doesn't count toward data caps on T-mobile (and peacock might not on comcast? Unclear).

The system specs that are floated out there are absolutely insane and I have to think there's been some sort of mistake made. They are cutting their already niche market into tiny pieces.

Wow. Huh. This is larger than a lot of folk's SSDs. Even with a 500 GB SSD, having 340GB as a requirement to unpack is an interesting choice.

And a 2080 and 9700k min spec? This may have made sense when 3060tis are plentiful, but when you can't get a 2080 or 30xx series card, that's an interesting choice.

Maybe EA has the metrics that shows that X% of people with a headset have this level of hardware, but this is taking a niche market and saying, "Hey, let's make this niche thing even more exclusive."

And most importantly, with a hardware requirement leap like this, do they have a booze in a bottle simulation that's better than what we see in Half Life Alyx?

Well those are some specs for sure. Wonder if it really looks that good. Will be interesting. I’m all for games pushing technical boundaries but these are higher specs relatively than Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Crysis required back in the day and those games were each a major generational leap in gaming visuals.

Destiny 2 was over 110 GB at its peak. After a bunch of stuff was removed, it's now just under 70 GB.

Now I have to pull up a video of this game because I don't remember it ever looking this good.