A hot topic of discussion among gamers today is the huge size that modern games are demanding as part of their minimum system requirements, just a few years ago no game was bigger than 30gb or so, but with the advent of dlc, battle passes and updates we can say that we have reached a point where it is rare for a game from a big studio not to weigh more than 100gb or even much more.
The reason for this seems to be relatively simple, the innovation of the studios, the constant improvement of the games in every technological aspect but especially in the increasingly specialized textures that have to store these titles in our pc.
if we go back to the beginnings of video games we can see that the textures have always covered a significant space in the final weight of a game, Mario Bros itself that weighed only 32 kilobytes and still had to use a specialized cartridge to run it on the NES, you could say it was a heavy game for the time, DOOM also comes to mind and was the one that quintupled the size of Super Mario in the short span of 7 years, weighing 3 MB.
There is a trend that seems to repeat itself with each new generation that passes, titles take a new technological leap, they have the luxury of using a lot more textures, lighting effects, improved sound and much heavier cinematics, in the case of DOOM the 3D textures were something new that along with the music and animations added significantly to the overall size of the game.
And when we get into the CD-ROM era I'm much more surprised, the game I'm going to use as a reference is Final Fantasy Vii but I'm sure there will be many others heavier, in short, this game didn't occupy a single disk but 3 that were distributed much of the entire game, textures, cinematics, scripts and animations, well each of these came to weigh 697 MB, multiplying by three we have a total of 1.97 GB!!! I don't know how many DOOM will fit in that number but I'm sure it's a lot.
By 2004 we start to see less distance between titles, for example GTA San Andreas was only 4 GB, which is still twice the size of Final Fantasy Vii but we don't see such big differences anymore, I'm not sure why but coincidentally with the arrival of 2010 and the improvement of 3D graphics we start to notice that pattern again.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011): 8 GB
even here it doesn't make much of a difference, but just wait a few years.
You can see games like Red Dead Redemption 2 easily exceeding 100 gb, of course you have to notice the much more detailed and realistic graphics that have to store a much larger amount of data and textures for the game to work properly, if we compare the amount of textures here with those of Mario Bros I'm sure that the entire character of mario would fit on the hoof of one of the horses in this game.
Another thing is the open world, the amount of content that RDR2 has available and the map where all these events happen is full of details (which also have textures, data) but above all is GIANT, so are all the maps, dialogues, events, missions, environmental elements among many other things.
and last but not least is Starfield, it hasn't been released yet but some rumors already place this game as a real SSD killer, and it doesn't surprise me knowing that apparently there will be several planets to explore, plus everything mentioned above with RDR2, textures, event data, dialogues, missions, animations and cinematics, all that adds up and knowing Bethesda I'm sure they will add something extra because they are terrible at optimizing their games.
The storage size of a video game is directly related to the quantity and quality of the media assets, the content and the complexity of the game. As technology advances and games become more sophisticated, it is natural for their storage size to increase, but I still find it very motivating to do this kind of post comparing sizes,
all the progress that has been made in recent times is exciting.
All yours, @slashint - Gamer, Video Game Analyst.
