I want to play it, but finding 120gb for Baldur’s Gate 3 was hard enough, so I’m going to have to pass until I can afford a bigger hard drive.
I'm pretty sure bethesda said playing starfield with a hard drive isn't great 1tb SSDs aren't too expensive anymore I'd really recommend moving away from a hard drive
Ah, yeah, I was using hard drive as a catch-all term. My laptop only holds M.2 drives. I’m old, it’s all hard drives to me. =P
Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.
Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?
I definitely support the hypothesis that calling all storage drives hard drives is an old curmudgeon thing 😅 I've been doing computer nerdery for way over 30 years, and a hard drive is a hard drive even if it doesn't have spinny disks in it
I don't know when I became my mother. It happened so gradually I barely even noticed.
I think we all swear to ourselves that we won't grow up to be like those old people who seem to cling to the past.
Then one day you find yourself going "well it's a hard drive to me, I don't care what it should be called"
A 1tb Steam Deck-sized NVMe drive is about 120 bucks right now. Not cheap. But not insanely prices either.
ah ok
Huh I always thought "hard drive" was the umbrella category, and SSDs and spinny disk drives are subcategories.
I think storage or storage drive is the umbrella term these days. "Hard drive" was always short for "Hard Disk Drive" (which was named in comparison to Floppy Disk Drive) but since it was the only type of drive used for non-volatile internal storage for a good 20 years or so, it became a catch-all term. These days, many people understand there's two different kinds and a lot of systems have both, so hard drive is becoming recognized to mean the spinning disks; as opposed to SSD, which is now an umbrella term incorporating 2.5" SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe, which are all Solid State Drives but different combinations of interfaces and form factors.
Nah, the "SS" and "HD" bits refers to how each storage disk reads data. HDDs use hard metal disks to read & write data, hence it got the misnomer hard disk drive. SSDs use solid state flash memory to read & write data, hence it being called a solid state drive.
If you want the general category, you'd want to say "storage drive" specifically since if you say "drive", that can also refer to an optical drive (AKA the CD slot) or a USB drive (AKA flash/thumb drives).
The classic, computer science term for all of these devices is "secondary storage", if anyone's looking for a way to confuse people briefly before explaining that you mean "hard drives, SSDs, etc."
You do realize storage drives aren’t exactly expensive?
Not expensive, but it's another expense that not everyone can drop immediately.
For most it would be a choice of upgrading to a new drive or getting two games.
M2 pcie 4 drives are getting pretty cheap recently. I got a 2tb one for 100 with a heat sink on sale. My main from Kingston was 70 with 1tb
Exciting stuff. I've long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I'll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We'll see in a couple weeks' time I s'pose
I've vowed never to pre-order, period.
Or at least until there are solid reviews, which was what I did with ToTK.
Gaming companies have to earn their money from me every single time.
I’ll be playing it via GamePass and can try to report back once I have some hours under my belt in it.
it is on gamepass
I'll just delete the large anti-preorder manifesto I was typing lol. Not that it doesn't remain, just not for this game for me in particular.
Have a low-medium texture download/install option. It's time!
It's not that easy to do but you could probably invest some time and create a system for that. I wonder how much it'd actually be used though. This would only really effect a subset of PC players.
I think you would be surprised. 1080p gaming is very much alive & 1080p gamers don't need ultra high rez textures. I would certainly love to use this option. Sometimes people would even prioritize their data plan over graphics, because not everyone is so obsessed with graphics.
Especially if at download it was explained to users they won't see a difference at 1080p, then even Steam & GoG could save some bandwidth. (plus it would be environmentally friendly)
can these subpar ~~double~~ triple a games stop not compressing and optimising their shit again, and not dumping all of their over compensating textures and files on us? no?...okay...
Not really the place for it, but why do some people still get so annoyed about the size of games these days?
If you want games to continue improving then the file sizes are going to increase. Maybe devs could do more, but at the same time it’s just a fact that high res textures and larger scale games need more space.
Fallout 3 released two hardware generations ago at around 8GB. Fallout 4 released last gen and sits at around 25GB. One generation later, Starfield is launching at ~140GB - almost 6x the file size of the previous generation.
I can't speak for everybody, but my PC storage didn't jump to 6x capacity in that amount of time, and my download speeds didn't get 6x faster. But I imagine that's why it's concerning to some people.
Even just going by console standards, we're looking at only a jump of 2x capacity between the Xbox One and Xbox Series X - or exactly the same if you have a Series S. It takes up over 20% of the storage Series S in just one game - with a mandatory install, unspecified patch sizes, impending DLC, etc.
Obviously there's a discussion to be had of WHY the games are increasing exponentially like that, but on the surface that's likely where the bulk of the frustration comes from.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.
That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.
Here's the thing: I don't want games to keep improving, at least, not in that way. It doesn't mean anything to me that the game includes ultraHD textures and looks stunning on an 8K monitor because I'm still rocking a 3070 with a 1080 120 Hz. The fact that it takes them three years to make a game look this good, which is meaningless to a majority of gamers who can't afford that kind of hardware, is especially frustrating. And now they're telling us for the pleasure of waiting so long for them to put the finishing touches on what is effectively marketing material, I have to reserve not just 100+ GB, but all that space on an SSD because the game loads too damn slow otherwise? That's like an eighth of the available space on your average m.2 drive, for one game, for something most people won't even be able to enjoy because their hardware just isn't made for that kind of output.
I don't want sixteen times the detail, I want an optimized game with serviceable assets and a gameplay loop that doesn't feel like a second job. And granted, this is getting beyond the graphics argument, but I like games that aren't afraid of not appealing to the broadest audience. I want my Fallout in Space to have more than four dialog options that all point the same direction. I want to make meaningful choices and play a character that has real opinions and can act accordingly, instead of endless modifiers on the gear of a voice-acted talking doll that exists to service a mostly linear plot. I don't want F4, I want FNV. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the reviews come out and it ends up being as meaningful as I want it to be, but I'm not holding my breath, and in all likelihood I'm not jumping through the hardware hoops to play a game I probably won't like.
Not everyone has large SSDs with space to spare to play multiple games, it seems like it would be pretty straight forward to have HD texture pack downloadable as DLC or something like Skyrim had back in the day, I wonder why more devs don't do that? That would give players a choice of which to use.
I think most people have 1tb of storage space and not much else. Most games these days are well under 100gb. In that respect, it’s kind of ridiculous to have one game take up 1/10th of your storage. I doubt most gamers are going to see those high res textures anyway.
Your point is valid though, too. Games are only increasing in size. I already have 5tb total in my PC but would need more space to install this particular game (I have a lot of games lol). I don’t have a problem upgrading but I don’t think a lot of people the money to buy a $70 plus a good HDD/SSD. Just my thoughts on this.
Yeah, people bitching like "nobody needs those big ass textures and high quality uncompressed audio." Maybe you don't need it, but high quality, textures are one of the easiest ways to improve graphic quality without putting that much load on the GPU. And I still rip my CDs as FLACs, so I want good audio quality in my games as well.
You really want lossless audio in games? Do you know how big FLACs are in comparison to OGGs? Could most people really hear the difference? Keep in mind the quality of the average headset or desktop speakers. I don't think any games store lossless audio. If they did, I'd bet they would be much, much bigger.
Do we have any sort of information on how big the Shattered Space Story Expansion is supposedly going to be? Because 30 bucks extra seems excessive, especially when the game is already 70 bucks. Kinda feels like they just want to lure you with the early access, which will likely be a hot mess anyway.
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On console the Premium edition includes it, and is 17GB larger.
File size isn't a good indicator for content. The majority of a game's file size is made up of assets, so at best you have most of that to be new models and textures of "something".
Sorry, I mistook “how big” as literally the file size.
Oh, sorry. No. I meant the actual content. Whether it is some short side story or a proper expansion of sorts.
I never, ever preorder. But, the Ryzen 5 CPU I just bought came with a code for Starfield. So I guess I may as well try this one out cold.
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