As hardware in the industry becomes more powerful, games start looking better and running smoother, and doing more impressive things with the tools at the developers’ disposal- which, of course, means that their sizes are also constantly increasing. This generation in particular has seen games’ file sizes touching ridiculous figures, often touching (if not exceeding) the 100 GB mark- hell, sometimes even patches for games can be larger than many full games out there.
While the new technology that goes hand-in-hand with any new generation is exciting – especially the coming one, with its talk of SSDs and what have you – the fact also remains that that also means games may very well become even larger. In fact, according to Ryan Shah, CEO and lead programmer of Kitatus and Friends, specifically thanks to the Unreal Engine 5’s micro-polygon rendering system, Nanite, game file sizes may very well end up increasing significantly.
Speaking about Unreal Engine 5 and its Nanite system in an interview with Wccftech, Shah said, “It takes a lot of the headache out of asset creation, but at the same time, it starts to raise more concerns. And one of the examples is Call of Duty: Warzone at the minute, as people are harassing Activision over the size of Call of Duty: Warzone. And I think when we’ve got technologies now in the Unreal Engine 5 that allow us to use the original source meshes, with the original source textures and everything like that, the game file sizes are going to have to skyrocket, which presents a unique set of challenges.”
There’s no shortage of issues – minor and otherwise – that go hand-in-hand with such massive file sizes, from cramping storage space (which might mean having to buy an external drive), to having to download massive patches (which might be especially torturous for those who don’t have particularly good connections), to even locking those who might not have internet access and are playing on discs out of major post-launch updates. That said, if we want to keep playing games that keep trying to look and run better and use exciting new technologies, larger file sizes are something we may just have to get used to.