Video games are getting bigger. Alarmingly so, to the point some take up huge chunks of your hard drive. Tim Cain, co-creator of the Fallout series and a longtime developer, is here to explain why that is, with a breakdown of how much the medium has evolved since he and Interplay plopped us into the wasteland back in 1997.
First, our monitors becoming bigger and handling better resolution is an immediate factor. "Every object you see in a 3D game is textured, those textures have to get higher resolution to still look good on higher resolution screens," he says. "As screens got bigger, textures got bigger."
Models, the physical objects in any game, are built on a similar principle. "Making models, you have to have a denser mesh, which is bigger to store, and then all those polygons, those get rendered to your screen with those higher-resolution textures," Cain continues.
He adds that optimization compounds the issue because you need to store multiple versions of many objects to account for distance and such. Then there's the frame-rate, a race to the moon in terms of performance. Current demand is jumping from 120 frames-per-second to 240, a facet complicated by multiplayer and millisecond differences in inputs.
"A higher frame-rate means a more complex, denser set of animations, so things look good when they move at that high frame-rate," he explains. This isn't even accounting for in-game videos. "Modern games have tons of cutscenes, maybe multiple opening cinematics," Cain states. "Maybe one before you get to the main menu, it's showing a video for what would’ve been a splash screen for the game's logo."
The obvious counterpart here is audio, another element that used to be relatively tidy that's now huge. "There's more music, more voice-over, more sound effects," he says. "We used to do, not even 8-bit, monophonic wav files that we compressed to beyond their breaking point. Now people are putting in tracks of music, and whole libraries of 100,000 voice-over lines."
But there's another, fundamental part of game development that's eating up space on your hard drive. "By far, the biggest contributor to why modern games are bigger is art," Cain finishes.
As if to prove his point, a Baldur’s Gate 3 player recently discovered Larian's RPG contains over 236 hours of recorded dialogue. Meanwhile, Helldivers 2 recently ballooned in size so much Arrowhead had to find a way to shave it right down again. A recurring problem with Call of Duty was its sizes until recently. Sadly, if we want games to continue growing, we may need to get used to buying new hard drives quicker than we'd like.
