Here's a new level of ineptitude. GOW 4 is an 80GB download.

[master_shake_]

80 GB DOWNLOAD or 80 GB of disk space after decompression? Completely different things.

Glorious PC Master Race laughs at disk space requirements. Ha! Ha! Ha!

remember the old days when installing something used to give you a visual image of the space left in your computers hard drive?

the good ol' days.

 

[nerp]

I'm glad I have plenty of SSD space and a 100mbit connection in this era of PC gaming.

 

[Anteaus]

GOW4 has 4K textures. This is the price we pay for being first. Doom (2016) was over 50GB if I remember correctly. At least PCs have some flexibility here with storage. I hope the PS4 Pro has BDXL capabilities in spite of not having 4K video support, otherwise we will see multi-disc games again.

 

[sxr7171]

I have 3.5TB but this crap will fill your drives up. You'll be juggling stuff all day between origin, uplay, steam and this joker store. I literally thought I had enough space but another 3 or 4 100GB games and I'll probably have to juggle and delete stuff again.

The real issue here is just how crappy their delivery service is. Just wait until it errors out and you search obscure error codes.

It just says "we had an error the error code is xxx if you want to look it up" or something stupid like that. Then when you look it up the solutions are really crappy. Some people had to literally reset Windows. I had to run WSreset a few times. Which caused downloads to restart from scratch.

 

[PowerK]

I'm glad I have plenty of SSD space and a 100mbit connection in this era of PC gaming.

Had 100Mbps connection since 2001. Moved on to 1Gbps FTTH connection two years ago. It's amazing.

 

[KMFJD]

Actually I have a good unlimited connection at 120mbps. But that stupid store keeps failing. It will download 90% and freeze. Then I have to run WSreset. Then I have to delete stuff in the software distribution folder. Just look up how crappy that store is in serving up large files.

But you can't blame ISPs always. You have to consider people in rural areas and remote areas where they can't lay out the pipe cost effectively. On top of that they can't even offer the reliability of a 2 bit download manager?

How this company that has been in software for 3 decades can't get this right is shocking. Steam basically laid out the way to do this. I suspect the store was designed for little trinket fart apps and not multi gigabyte downloads. That explains a lot of this nonsense. I mean can't they properly pause and resume downloads? The technology has been around for a long time.

Even Ubisoft and origin get this right. So easy to right click and verify installation and fix the download/install. This garbage is all or nothing. If it doesn't finish it starts right from the beginning again. It is pure trash. Every time it's the same fight. GOW UE, Quantum Break. Same fecal experience every time.

Every time a new promise. This time we'll make it available simultaneously on PC and XBox. The anniversary update will fix that joke of a store. Every time you give those jokesters a chance they are consistent. Consistent at failing and disappointing.

Sounds like they borrowed Square Enix's Launcher/patcher which just keeps failing to update/download the game, sounds like the exact same issue you are having.

 

[sxr7171]

GOW4 has 4K textures. This is the price we pay for being first. Doom (2016) was over 50GB if I remember correctly. At least PCs have some flexibility here with storage. I hope the PS4 Pro has BDXL capabilities in spite of not having 4K video support, otherwise we will see multi-disc games again.

In that sense there were those 50GB shockers like Titanfall and Wolfemstein.

But suppose there are two threads in this thread.

One expressing shock at the size of the games. I see valid arguments both ways on that. I can just say that these companies can argue 4K textures blah blah but seriously none of them look better than Ryse Son of Rome or even The Division. I'm okay with 80GB but this better look good. The explanation doesn't matter as much as the result. If it doesn't look the part I would just say super lazy devs. They took an Xbox one game put the "4K" artwork into it and shipped it. I've seen entire "4K" texture packs come in in under 10-20GB.

In the case of Titanfall if I remember correctly the lazy (redacted) put every single language in there and didn't compress the audio. Are they serious? You can't tell no matter what nut head audiophile will tell you. Fix your room and your speakers first and then maybe you might notice a difference if you concentrate on the sound. Are you playing a game or having an audiophile listening session? If that's true and we accepted it and I'm sure some of us even championed it who's to say what these lazy bums will do next?

The second thread in here is the ineptitude of that silly store. I've heard the arguments about not buying from there. I don't have a problem with having accounts at multiple stores. But my gosh this one looks great but has the functionality of a store that would fit in well with Windows millennium edition. The store looks polished, slick, and shows the years of experience they gained from making Xboxes and serving up Xbox live but it works like crap.

They make it look like a polished consumer facing system but it needs to tinkered with like Windows 98 to actually function.

For me the net result was even though I paid through the nose for early access on an edition I'm not even sure I want, I still haven't had a chance to play yet. Hopefully that will be resolved.

Just to be clear I'm far from the only one with this issue. It's all over the internet if you search. I suppose these games on PC is so ultra niche that the mainstream tech news sites don't bother with it. PC gamers that have system capable of playing AAA games is a small subset of PC gamers. From there many don't want to use that store. Others are not interested in the game etc.

But I just want everyone to know that if you have expectations for things purchased there to just not have them. You will eventually get it up work but it might take weeks.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If they really have 20 GB of 4K textures it is a bit stupid to force all users to download them, instead of making that a separate download. Just like 10 GB of French audio should be.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I was unaware they were bringing Gears of War to PC. Haven't been keeping up with it since GoW 2.

 

[sxr7171]

If they really have 20 GB of 4K textures it is a bit stupid to force all users to download them, instead of making that a separate download. Just like 10 GB of French audio should be.

That's what I mean. There have been several games that offered optional 4K textures and honestly most were under 10GB. Now who knows what 4K textures really means? It's pretty much a marketing term. Does it mean 4 times the pixels of the default textures?

If there is a definition I don't know it. All I know is that most optional texture packs labeled 4K have been pretty light. Nowhere close to 80GB.

And yes Titanfall or Wolfenstein did something ridiculous like that. Adding a bunch of languages failing to compress audio etc. For all we know all these 50+GB games are jerking our chain because nobody protested. The one time PC gamers got what they wanted was with Arkham Origins. I was surprised they actually cared about that situation.

These clowns on the other hand were ready to deploy a video spy cam in every home and only with protests did they stop. These clowns are the type to get away with as much as they can. I hate to say it but at this moment the amount of data these clowns collect makes the entirety of data currently in the world look small. It's only when you see how inept they are running a small download service like this you know it doesn't matter.

 

[Gryz]

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

That's all there is to say to this. Stop whining. (One post complaining about something is maybe acceptable. Writing a 80 GB of whining on a forum is a waste of everybody's bandwidth). The product is not for you. That's obvious to all of us. Now accept it yourself. Don't buy it. Buy something else. Play something else. Even though your mummy told you you deserve everything you want, truth is that the world has not been created just to make spoiled millennials happy.

Now get off my lawn.

 

[sxr7171]

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

That's all there is to say to this. Stop whining. (One post complaining about something is maybe acceptable. Writing a 80 GB of whining on a forum is a waste of everybody's bandwidth). The product is not for you. That's obvious to all of us. Now accept it yourself. Don't buy it. Buy something else. Play something else. Even though your mummy told you you deserve everything you want, truth is that the world has not been created just to make spoiled millennials happy.

Now get off my lawn.

Seeing how this thread has posters and comments you're the fly in the ointment. It may be a waste of your bandwidth but you apparently chose to use your bandwidth to download it and on top of that actually read it and you took the time to write. How nice.

You saw the topic. It was your choice at multiple points to: not click on it. Not read it. And certainly to not write about it. Maybe you can continue your rant about millennials in P&N. That's a forum I know not to click on.

Also if in any case you work for those clowns tell them to put a disclaimer in before we buy: "this product will give you problems downloading and installing and also when finally installed will fail to run."

 

[sxr7171]

So at least Forza finally installed after several attempts to fix their store. But now it loads up to the Turn 10 studios animation and crashes to desktop.

Ha ha! Excellent quality software. I surely knew it would do that before I paid for it.

Now I just wonder how much time I'll spend troubleshooting the actual product now. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get to play for a little bit even.

Edit: it's going to be an evening reading instead of playing: http://forums.forzamotorsport.net/t...tartup--no-error-messages--no-crash-logs.aspx

 

[escrow4]

It took me 14 hours or so to download Doom which is 55GB, heading towards the end, the game runs for around 14 hours. Ridiculous. I literally need 2 full days to download and install and then finally getting around to playing. Download sizes are obscene.

 

[nerp]

Download while you sleep!

And Forza problems sound typical of just-launched releases these days. At least it won't be as bad as Half Life 2.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Download sizes are because people want prettier graphics and to my knowledge, compression technology hasn't advanced very much in the last years. It's not keeping up, anyways.

 

[Elixer]

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is 90GB.
This is why they need to break it up with texture packs, you don't need the 4k textures if you don't have the hardware to use it.
They also have tons of repeated textures, because of the way games stream things...

 

[Anteaus]

It's not only textures. Not all cinematics are rendered with the game engine in real time. It is common for games to have pre-rendered cutscenes which can take up huge amounts of space. Sure, you could render at a lower resolution that native, but that hurts production value and ultimately brings on more negative criticism than positive. I'm already playing at 4K at home, and I am not apologetic about saying that I want everything to be at 4k, top to bottom. This discussion is about games which are leading the charge into 4K. There was bound to be heightened requirements to take advantage of it. There are plenty of other games out there than take up a tiny fraction of the space.

Maintaining separate texture packs for each resolution used to be common, but I've noticed that it is becoming more common for a game to have one master texture pack at max supported resolution and then rendering those textures at lower resolution in real time. Ironically, this improves graphic fidelity for lower resolutions because it provides the option to scale your in-game resolution higher than your display resolution, oversampling I think it is called. You might not think the 4K textures benefit you, but they do.

We went through this when PC games went all digital and I'm sure there will be further growing pains. Internet caps are finally coming up in many places and SSD prices are dropping constantly. Some will get left out in the short term, but eventually it will all catch up.

 

[nerp]

Yes we had similar discussions when games went from CD to DVD and people did not have DVD drives, etc. If SSD sizes were double what they are today for half the price, the concern would be less great. The people stuck with slow internet is a problem. Clearly, these folks have to figure downloading new games is a background/overnight task and clicking the purchase button means buy now, play tomorrow of the next day.

It's not like console gaming is much better. Games come out with big day 1 patches now. Everything has to be installed to the internal disk. People are buying external hard drives for their consoles. And the console is getting regular software updates. I can just imagine the kids ripping open their brand new xbox and games on Christmas only to spend the rest of the day waiting for the damn thing to update, reboot, download, install, update, reboot, patch, update, etc.

 

[QueBert]

NBA 2k16's like 50 gigs, for a basketball game. And I've read 2k17 will need 70 gigs, for a basketball game.

I'd LOVE to buy it, but there's only a download version, and on the free city provided wifi I use it would take me around 1,850 hours to download 70 gigs. Not everyone has a high speed connection, or high speed enough to download 70 gigs in a resonable amount of time. Let me buy it on DVD, yeah it would be like 9 DVD's. HL2 came in a whole stack of CD's, sucks you can buy these new games on physical media.

*NOTE: I love basketball & basketball games*

 

[XavierMace]

And this is why people make fun of PC gamers. They are never happy. They complain that new games don't look better than old. So developers finally start shipping games with higher quality textures. Then they complain those take up too much space. Like somebody else said, it was the same thing when games moved to DVD. They COULD move PC games to Bluray but then you'd have people complaining about not having a Bluray drive.

For the record, I kicked off the Forza Horizons 3 download on both my PC and the XBOne before I left for work. I can't say I looked at how big it was, but I also don't care. I've only bought four games on disk in the last I don't know, 6 years? Those were collectors editions where I wanted the shiny physical object they included for one reason or another. I couldn't care less if it had a game disk, I would have happily downloaded it either way. You mention The Division like it was fine and I know it was 30Gb so where do you personally draw the line and why? I've never played GoW but I know Forza has a buttload of videos and audio commentary where as Division does not. In addition, Division recycles a LOT of assets, further decreasing the size. So, with that in mind, Forza being at least twice that size doesn't surprise me nor seem unreasonable.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I just checked the preload and it's 80GB. Is there no such thing as compression in the world? Does this really need 80GB of space?

Of course it requires that much space, what do you think they're doing, just filling the game install with large files full of nothing but zeros? Textures and modern uncompressed audio are high file size, should well all suffer a bad quality game because you have rubbish internet? NO!

80Gb is one of the largest file sizes I've seen for games, but if you have a good internet connection then 80gb is absolutely nothing at all. 80Gb is about 81,920MB and I get about 25MB/sec download speeds so that's like a 54 minute download. That's a smaller amount of time than it would take for me to get my shoes on, walk into town and buy a game from a shelf and walk back, and I live in the middle of a major city. Even if you have half of that (100mbit internet) then you're talking about less than 2 hours.

Yes I know the world is really ending, 54minutes and you can't play your game, look at the dinosaurs rampage through the streets firing lasers from their eyes.

Compression is fine but guess what, it takes time to uncompress large amounts of data, the simple fact is that recently bandwidth has become more readily available than CPU power, that means it's faster to simply send 80gb of mildly compressed or uncompressed data than it is to send say 50GB of highly compressed data and then spend 4 hours unpacking it.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

That's what I mean. There have been several games that offered optional 4K textures and honestly most were under 10GB. Now who knows what 4K textures really means? It's pretty much a marketing term. Does it mean 4 times the pixels of the default textures?

Textures do have their own internal resolution but "4k textures" is somewhat ambigious, it may refer to texture which are themselves 4kx4k in resolution, or it may refer to textures which are appropriate for 4k monitors, which is a different thing, internally textures can and do go above 4k, in fact the megatexture stuff thats in the idtech5+ engine is essentially just 1 massive texture. Textures for 4k displays are really textures large enough so that when in game they're rendered in game typically match about the same pixel density as the screen. This is very ambiguous because it depends how you're displaying your textures in game, how close they are to the view port and at what FOV, etc.

Higher res textures have benefit for lower than 4k monitors if you're using things like AA and AF, because these technologies are designed to take sub-pixel samples to get a more accurate picture and so benefit all users even those without 4k screens.

That all said I wouldn't be against any technology that offers custom download sizes depending on locale (language) or texture settings, providing devs dont have to waste too much time making it, I don't personally need it but apparently some people would prefer lower quality games and I don't see any reason to allow them that trade off.

 

[JTsyo]

I was unaware they were bringing Gears of War to PC. Haven't been keeping up with it since GoW 2.

nVidia is even bundling their 1070 and 1080 with it.

 

[TheELF]

And Forza problems sound typical of just-launched releases these days.

Only that they released Forza apex for this exact reason and it still has the same exact problems...