alt Hacker News> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days"
Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it!
I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures?
In particular I find the massive disparity between decently similar games interesting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes something like 130gb on my Xbox, whereas Robocop: Rogue City takes something like 8gb. They have similar visual fidelity, I would say Robocop might have a little bit of a lead, but Indiana Jones has fancier dynamic lighting.
At 130gb though, I almost could have streamed my entire playthrough of the game at 4k and came out on top.
These days I am just assuming it is textures. Textures for graphic quality, that I don't need on my merely full HD screens. Makes me usually not even bother buying, let alone installing such a game. Even 23 GB is still tons. When I compare that with how much fun I can have playing games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics, I would rather safe money, than spending it and having to go through my files and delete things, because I need more space for a game.