All Aboard the Bloat Boat

Years ago, there was a time when my friends and I would have conversations about hard drives and say stuff like, "It's a whole gigabyte? What would someone do with all that space?!?" Now, a good 20 years later it's all about the terabytes. Huge, hulking drives with what seems like enough space to keep any sensible person happy for years. However, when one looks at the steadily bulging sizes of a lot of major game releases that come out each year, it's hard not to wonder if even these new technical marvels' days are already numbered.

It's only been over the last year that I've really begun to take notice of this trend, starting with the PC release of Final Fantasy XIII. When I perused the specs for the game on its Steam page, I noticed that it requires a 60GB download. Even with all of the fancy cut scenes and dual Japanese / English voice acting, that's a pretty bitter pill to swallow, and required some creative uninstalling to make space for it. Sure, we get slightly less annoying dialogue from Vanille, Hope, and Snow, but it comes at a very high cost.

Final Fantasy is by no means alone, though. There are plenty of other games that are sporting some rather hefty downloads. Titles like Wolfenstein: The New Order (50GB), Elder Scrolls Online (85GB), Grand Theft Auto V (65GB), and Batman: Arkham Knight (55GB) are but a few examples of the bloat we're beginning to see in terms of how much hard drive space games are beginning to gobble up.

Granted, all of the games that I've mentioned are of the AAA variety. Those that have little to no interest in that sort of thing aren't really affected. Nonetheless, there's still a substantial number of people who do like them, and are being impacted by this.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 50GB goliath.

To an extent, growing game sizes makes sense. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it's something that has been happening for years. With each leap forward in technology, we've seen games' graphics get better, but it comes at the cost of bigger files. Now, as this process has continued for 30 years or so we're at this point where the files in question are gargantuan.

That being said, when I look at some of the other recent titles to come out that have had some very high fidelity visuals, they haven't suffered from quite the same bloat as the traditional AAA games have. One just needs to look at something like The Witcher III or Elite: Dangerous. Both have been released only in the last year, have stunning visuals, and yet they've managed to avoid the 50GB+ club. This in mind, it does begin to bring into question what some of these other studios are doing when making their games. Is there a certain level of sloppiness in the coding that is contributing to this bloat?

Elite: Dangerous looks gorgeous, yet manages to clock in
at only 7GB.

At least on the PC gaming side of things we can readily address the issue simply by installing a bigger hard drive. This will at least make sure there is enough space to accommodate these games. However, unless you go with one that is solid state, there will still be hurdles, that being the thing's writing speed. HDDs are quite slow when it comes to this, and installing one of these mammoth-sized games on such hardware takes some time. When I was installing Final Fantasy XIII, I pretty much couldn't do anything else with that computer once the process got into full swing. Adding insult to injury was having to wait over two hours for everything to complete. It's a bit of a drag having to deal with something like that. Obviously, over time SSD will come down in price, the process has already started, but as it stands, the technology is still more of a luxury than anything else for a number of people. Even when it does become affordable to the masses and we don't have to deal with sluggish write times anymore, it won't change the fact that these games are massive storage hogs that only seem to be getting bigger.

This doesn't even take into account the console side of things. Those have some pretty small hard drives that can fill up fast. It is possible to replace them, though much easier on the PS4 than the Xbox One by most accounts. The question is how many people out there will actually do this. I'm sure the majority of those reading this article have the technical wherewithall to do such a swap in their sleep. However, when it comes to the general public, I'm not so sure. How many people in that group will upgrade their console HDDs? I can't imagine them doing so en masse.

Grand Theft Auto 5 gobbles up 65GB
on PC.

Whether one has the means and knowledge to upgrade their hard drive, be it on a PC or console, there's one area where they will likely have far less control: their ISP. With games shifting so heavily to digital distribution they're going to have to get downloaded from somewhere, and that means bandwidth consumption. In my neck of the woods, this is a serious concern. Plans top off around 400-500GB transfer per month, and it comes at a fairly hefty price tag. More common plans average about half of that. So, if someone wants to download even a couple of these massive games, they could well have eaten up half or more of their allotted bandwidth for the month. If someone streams a lot of movies, downloads various other things, and generally makes thorough use of their internet connection on a regular basis, they could suddenly find themselves hitting their bandwidth cap and being throttled or paying additional fees after.

All of this being said, I have to wonder if the growing install size of modern games will be a problem that is corrected on its own. It's hard to imagine this not impacting purchasing decisions. I know I'm thinking twice before buying a game now, taking the time to look at its specs and make sure of just how much hard drive space the thing is going to take. If it's over 25GB I stop and give the game some very serious thought before proceeding. In many cases, I actually don't buy it, or at least put it off for quite some time. Sure, I'm missing out on an experience, but I also don't have to rearrange a small army of other games in order to make space for that big one. Moreover, it alleviates having to worry about going over my bandwidth limit for the month.

Elders Scrolls Online takes a whopping 85GB of storage space.

It wouldn't surprise me if others are doing likewise, and this may well help to force developers to examine how they're making their games. Should sales begin to take a hit because games are getting to darn big, they'll have to sit down and take a look at what they're doing and find a way to address the issue. The sad thing is that I don't see this happening any time soon. For now, we're just going to have to suffer through these massive installs, and get creative with managing hard drive space and our monthly bandwidth.

Review: GTA V (PC)

It's safe to say that Grand Theft Auto V is one of those games that just keeps on giving. And two years after its initial release on consoles, GTA V has reached its most potent form on PC. Besides an extensive single-player story that stretches across an expansive world, the game packs in a full suite of video editing tools to create exportable films, a complete multiplayer mode that's heavy on action, and another awesome soundtrack that features just about every genre of music one can recall.

Feature: GTA V Comments (Part IV) - Stunt Island

Barnstorming circa 1992

In 1992 game developer Assembly Line and publisher Disney Interactive unleashed Stunt Island on an unsuspecting public.

Before buying Stunt Island I hadn't read anything about it and YouTube had zero videos of the game (owing to the fact it didn't exist yet). My decision to buy the game was based entirely on the information on the back of the box and how heavy it was in my hands. The manual was thick with instructions and it "thumped" into the sides of the box when I shook it. In 1992, I often considered a PC game's worth by the weight of the box and the sound of all the "extras" sliding around inside, so basing a purchase on this criteria wasn't unusual.

Feature: GTA V Comments (Part III) - Canadian

Okay, think of Canada.

What was the first stereotypical image that jumped into your head? Did it include bacon, hockey, maple syrup, moose, Mounties, poutine, donuts? A beaver galloping through the Rocky Mountains? Some kind of weird amalgam of all of those things on a poster shaped like a toque being sold by Bob and Doug McKenzie on kijiji?

I'll bet the character below never entered your thoughts:

Trevor Phillips, Lord of Chaos

Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part II) - Climate Change

Why don't more GTA V citizens ride bikes?

At first I couldn't put my finger on why littering in GTA V sparked in me a mixture of irritation, a high level of anger, and sadness. At first I thought it might be due to the casualness of the littering. Michael finishes coffee with an FIB agent, and Michael leaves his coffee cup on the patio table, the agent throws his on the ground. I switched to Franklin at one point as he finished off a can of Sprunk. He then tossed it to the sidewalk.

In real life, littering does irritate me, especially when the item being tossed is recyclable. Is your life so damn busy you can't hold on to that empty can for bit to drop it into a recycling bin? Or hand it over to a can collector? After some deep thinking, I think the reason it grates on me so much because Los Santos/Blaine County is a closed system. For all we know, it could be a biodome on Mars or trapped in a snow globe on the desk of Tobias Funke. Either way, the boundaries of the world in GTA V are clearly defined and there's a definite "Here be Dragons!" hard edges to the map. (Other countries and nationalities are name-checked but we never see those places.) So the fact that all the characters in GTA V seem to treat littering like it's no big deal is incongruous with what daily life should entail, which is a lot of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Feature: Comments on GTA V (Part I) - "Realism"

The simple warning logo for airbags (see above) found on most vehicles sold in North America today (exceptions include motorcycles and Hoverounds), demonstrates why Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is about as realistic as betting your rent and your insulin on winning the lottery and expecting everything to work out a-okay. As "real" as some people like to think the GTA series is there are these great big holes in "reality" that we all seem to willfully ignore.

Review: Grand Theft Auto V (360)

There are AAA games and there is Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

The newest tale of criminals and corruption Rockstar establishes GTA as the pre-eminent gaming franchise today, with 29 million units shipped to date and a ridiculously impossible-to-believe $1 billion in sales in the first 72 hours of its release. And it deserves every cent, with a magnificently huge open-world of Los Angeles stand-in Los Santos -- filled with celebrities, wannabe celebrities and those who exploit them -- being the backdrop to a superior heist-filled storyline with great dialogue, great satire. Rockstar has once again crafted another exceptional, long-lasting game that's good enough to be a Hollywood blockbuster.