[spain]

At least with Titanfall coming in at 48 GB (and probably other heavy-weight AAA titles coming out nowadays) the reason for the huge size wasn't really the amount or quality of the assets, but mostly just because the audio assets were uncompressed. According to them it was so that "they could dedicate more system resources to running the game, and less to unpacking audio files." [0]

[0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132922-Titanfall-D...

[jjoonathan]

The US Army has them beat.

About 10 years ago they released a first person shooter called "America's Army." It was free, it was mac compatible, and for a kid that wasn't really supposed to be video gaming that was a killer combination. When they stopped updating the mac version I started poking around the files to see if I could backport some of the maps from the newer PC version to the older mac version. One of the first things I implemented was texture import/export. I wanted it to work on entire folders at a time and I didn't want to rely on EXIF annotations to store the pixel format of textures so I relied on the hack of looking at the histogram to see if an image should be stored in the compressed format.

At first I thought I had a bug: I knew for a fact that some textures were stored uncompressed (RGBA8) and some were stored compressed (DXT3,5) but they were all importing as compressed. Turns out the bug wasn't in my code. Someone had lossfully compressed the textures and then stored the compressed images in an uncompressed format.

I sent the devs an email letting them know how they could save ~50% of their download size at no further loss of quality by re-enabling compression. I never got a direct response but the next day they banned me for hacking. Naturally, when the next version of the game came out the problem still wasn't fixed.

A few years later I told my parents. My father, who had served in the army, just laughed and said "Now that's the Army I remember!"

[thirsteh]

Ironically the disk IO probably far outweighs any decoding overhead.

Also, from what I understand: Not only did they include raw audio, they included raw audio for every single language, even in the download version.

[voltagex_]

Holy crap. That's going to be painful for anyone with under about 20 megabit downstream. There are internet plans in Australia that have less quota than that per month.

Can anyone comment on whether the CPU hit from using something like FLAC or Opus would really cause that much of a CPU hit? Especially when you're playing with about 4 threads minimum in an older gaming PC.

(Wouldn't the consoles have hardware accelerated audio too?)

[sossles]

The bit that really irks me is that this is a compromise to help support lower-specced PCs - PCs that probably also have smaller HDs.