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[Rogue]

Just couple of days ago I installed Sims 2 on my computer. Normal size of installation is 3.5GB?! :blink:

You can place large DOS collection on that amount of space!

For the moment I remembered C64 where rarely you had more then one 174KB floppy.

What do you think will happen in next 15-20 years of the gamming?

[Eagle of Fire]

It certainly is a deterrent to PC gaming, and may in the long term end up turning PC gamers into console gamers. Consoles don't have those kind of problems, and most of the PC gamers out there don't want to work their way thru a system just to play their games. Everyone like it simple after all, since it's supposed to be a way to have fun and relax, not a way to bring even more problems to you before you can actually benefit from the experience.

[Doubler]

Well, instalation speeds up as new software and medium types become available, and hard disks get larger all the time.
Instalation time hasn't increased that much from the first time I installed Settlers II long ago, and even relatively my hard disk space has increased massively. I don't see much trouble, actually.

[Tulac]

How did PC gaming survive up to date then? From what I remember floppy's weren't the fastest medium of them all, and yet people were playing PC games even then...
Both the capacity and speed is rising, with the overall growth in complexity (by this I mean graphics mostly)...

[troop18546]

Well, nowadays game capacity is from 1GB to 5GB, but in my opinion - games in the next 15-20 years could be from 10 to 60 GB. Even now there are BlueRay disks and games are often placed in massive CD quantities. But if developers do decide to make a game that "weighs" 60GB, then it will be a long and hard process.

This also adds another good question:
Wonder what kind of HDD's will have in the next 15-20 years??? In the last 3 years, the HDD space jumped from 20, to 360GB hard disks. What a rush! :blink:

[Scatty]

Somewhere there's always a natural limit, be it because of impossibility to reach higher speeds without heating the PC too much up or because of HD's need to grow larger for even more space. Eventhough modern games can be today up to 4GB large it takes more and more time to produce them. And the bugs in the games grow, together with growing absence of fun factor in them because of the work of a 100men+ team which suffocates the imagination and creativity.
I doubt there will be games much larger than 10GB in near future, unless there will be only very few games released on costs of increased size, better (how much better can they be yet? :eeeeeh graphics and longer play-time. Unless the tendence will go entirely over to games that are like MMORPG's that are updated, improved and corrected constantly all the time, and who knows, maybe in 3 years it will be a completely normal and daily thing to pay monthly for play a game. And then there slowly will appear flat-rates for a bundle of many games together, similar to the flat-rate of DSL providers today... :whistle:

[Don Andy]

Well, this may sound crazy, but I think the games could be smaller, they just don't want them to.

Look at this game: kkrieger

Its size: 96 kb

And this just by optimizing code and procedual creating.

If commercial companies would use similar methods, games could be a lot smaller.
Afaik a lot of content in Spore is created procedual. The game shouldn't be that big.

But of course, if every cool game would be just a few KB or even a few 100 MB, who would buy all the expensive 250 GB harddrives? Right, no one.

You get my point?

Of course, this all may sound like just another conspiracy theory, but that's exactly what it is :bleh:

[troop18546]

On my PC kkrieger LAGED more than F.E.A.R. (it has 6-10 frames/s).
Seriously, these guys ought to stick to encoding movies, more use of talent.
As for games, let it be 10GB, but no lags.

[Doubler]

Interesting, but I've heard of it before.
I haven't checked it out, though. How is the content vs. creation time?

[Eagle of Fire]

I remember being aggravated at finding out that some games were getting bigger than the 200 megs back in the days. Today, I am still very annoyed when I realise that some games take up more than 1 gig on my harddrive.

A game taking 4-5 gig of space? What kind of game is that? Do you need a full encyclopedia library for reference for taking that much place on your hd, or is it just the in-game manual taking that much place? :blink:

Anyhow, you would expect games to take less and less space on a HD, not the opposite. Lag is not at all an issue here, I remember playing plenty of games back in the days in which you had no option of using the CD instead of creating a full-hd version on your computer, and those games never lagged. The only difference was that the CD-rom was working, so that argument is really null.

The only real reason why games take so much place is because of the "new and improved" graphics... Which are really not needed to have fun on a game, IMHO. Thus, I find it rather pointless. When I buy a game, I want the best I can have for the money I pay... And to be frank, that's not happening with those new games which get out nowaday. The size of the game on my HD is only one of the small issues which, brought together, make the games boring VS the old games we have on this site.