[sgarland]

Eh, not the same. All the games I remember spanning multiple discs (Emperor: Battle for Dune took four, for example) were that large due to FMV cutscenes.

I understand that 3D textures are large files, but surely there is some hideous bloat occurring to cause the explosion in size.

And outside of games, the same bloat occurs, so it’s not just textures. “Let’s ship an entire browser rendering engine with our app” hasn’t exactly helped.

[eru]

Interestingly enough, Hitman (the remakes) slimmed down their installed size by the time Hitman 3 rolled around. They said that thanks to SSDs being around, they didn't have to optimize for the slow random read speeds of HDD anymore.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/oqb7jc/how_is_hitma...