I thought I’d finally give the game that changed everything a go but jesus christ. what is going on.

  • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    Uncompressed or minimally compressed high resolution textures is my hypothesis. Back in the PS2 era when most games could fit on a 4.7GB DVD, the highest resolution textures you’d get was 512x512. A total of 262 144 pixels. These days, highest resolution texture is probably 4096x4096. 16 777 216 total pixels. 64x more pixels. Modern textures also store more colour information. While image compression formats and algorithms have improved significantly in 20 years, there’s only so much that can be done without reducing image quality. No one wants to see compression artifacts on their giant 4k TV or 4K monitor inches from their face after spending a small fortune on a video game (fortnite is free to play, but you get the general idea).

    • ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net
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      14 days ago

      fortnite is free to play

      They make all their money from purely cosmetic microtransactions, so it’s probably even more relevant

  • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    The first aspect is obviously rushed development. Developers and artists can absolutely take some time to make games run smoothly with smaller assets. On the contrary, to complete a game as fast as possible you can employ many time-saving tricks that waste ungodly amounts of resources like duplicating a ton of stuff ect

    Secondly, compressing files to make them smaller on the disk increases loading times, and on a capitalist standpoint it’s a way better choice to not compress anything because preying on impulsive playing is more important than making your game easier to try since the dominant economic model is to milk your existing playerbase rather than trying to expand it

  • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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    14 days ago

    I’ve played literally every conceivable game mode in Counter Strike: Source except the main one endlessly and had as such acquired in at the latest 2009 literally every copyright infringement skin, spray, map and voice line you could get and it wasn’t like that.

  • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    All the stuff other people said plus the fact that fortnite is a “main game” and so wants to be large enough that the average consumer can’t have many other main games on their system.

    If you have to uninstall fortnite to try the new ballefield you’re less likely to do so

  • daniyeg [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    if i had to guess two things: 1. big battle royale maps need huge sizes, almost all battle royale games are over 100 GB 2. skins and other assets used in promotions. lots of them. stored in high quality for high end users and uncompressed to decrease load times.

    fortnite has been going on for 8 years i think and in each season there have been at least one or two promotion or crossover events, and a shit ton of skins (which were more than they could show on their storefront so they could cycle the skins into and out of the shop to create a FOMO effect). it just adds up in the 40 seasons or so fortnite has been running. and there is no end in sight so get ready to break the 200 GB barrier in a year or two.

    • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      13 days ago

      The OG world of Warcraft map is much, much bigger than Fortnite, there’s a ton more skins of weapons, armor, enemy sprites, etc, and the OG install is probably <15GB.

      • daniyeg [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        13 days ago

        you cannot compare uncompressed 4k textures with probably compressed 720p textures, they are orders of magnitude bigger in size. and the OG wow map pre flight is basically a bunch of valleys carved with mountains there are massive gaps in the map geometry (it’s still big though just not as big).

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    Games just keep increasing in fidelity, but it’s all done at the development stage instead of being algorithmically generated at runtime, so you get giant, complex geometries and textures that bake in a bunch of algorithms performed during development (like generating terrain or noisy textures or whatever). It takes a long time for that to shift to runtime. And storage is “cheap” right now so they don’t care.

  • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    old + live service + full of crossover bullshit = thousands upon thousands of texture and audio files, the heap of shit doesn’t just grow, it accelerates each year as the devs settle in and churn out content faster and crossovers become more common, and “fuck it, storage is denser and cheaper than when we launched” becomes an increasingly comfortable excuse to not compress everything

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    gamer-gulag capitalist mutual aid by making system requirements so ludicrous that they can sell more expensive hardware to treatlerlite consoomers. As part of this mutual aid, they also enforce brutal crunch times on their replaceable proletariat who will get laid off after the next battle pass.

    Play indie games, play retro games, pirate everything.

  • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 days ago

    Fortnite is an absurdly big platform now. I have it installed for playing with younger family members sometimes and it’s now multiple full games (a huge Rock Band clone with hundreds of songs, a full racing game, the original wave-based game, the main battle royale), over dozen game modes just by the developers a lot of which have their own maps weapons and more, thousands and thousands of skins and accessories and live service / shop shit, and then on top of all that there’s maybe tens of thousands of other games built in their engine as it’s become a huge garbage pile of user generated content games to rival Roblox. Throw in localisation, sound for all that, and stuff that doesn’t even get used all the time like locations and designs for live events and concerts and it’s an absurd amount of stuff. I’d argue a lot of it is junk, but it’s kind of crazy how much stuff Fortnite ‘is’ now.

  • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    How / why is fortnite so big? I played it at a friend’s place when it came out, thought it was very mediocre and would die off quickly (not what I like in an FPS) and then it just exploded in popularity. How much can you milk the “minecraft FPS battle royale” concept? The natural life cycle of this is that within 5 years it should have settled into a dedicated playerbase of maybe 300-1000 active players at any one time, clinging stubbornly to this game they love while everyone else has moved on because there’s only so many times you can play minecraft fps