Warzone dev says game is losing players over “insane” download sizes | Hacker News Reader

Warzone dev says game is losing players over “insane” download sizes

arstechnica.com

23 pointsjbernardo957 comments

So what's in these massive installs? I'd love to see a breakdown.

With Warzone the situation is a-typical because you have to download the whole of Modern Warfare even if you have not purchased the game and only wish to access Warzone.

Typically textures are the largest part. Many objects with many different channels in high resolutions e.g. Color, normal, roughness, metallic, emissive, AO/Lightmaps and more depending on shader. The other two significant contributors are sounds and mesh geometry.

Ah that would explain it - I know there are lots of high resolution textures and high quality sounds in modern games but there's still a limit to what can fit in RAM etc.

There is more "stuff" in games too I suppose but it's not like games have twice as many maps/levels as they did 10 years ago.

I'm guessing a lot here but these types of titles typically ship with very high res assets of various types.

In terms of textures it's not just one for each entity, but often a complete stack of textures like albedo, detail map, normal map, ambient occlusion map etc. All in 4K or possibly higher these day

Then there's high res audio, UI textures, massive terrain textures (again stacked), skybox textures (HDR cubemaps in high res), bits and bobs, weapons, animations, the list goes on.

Assets for these types of games are heavy.

Programming games is hard. That's why most of them are texture decompressors.

I wonder how much of it is all the Skins and Cosmetics you have to download even if you never bought them as someone else might have it equipped.

Could be one of the options, but at least for my friend group, we stopped playing because there’s no balance. Three or four players in a server with aim bots, and a solid ten percent who are just really good to the point of being unbeatable with the default loadout, make it entirely unenjoyable for a casual player, so we swapped to something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com