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Comment by iLoch | Hacker News Reader

I was at work today and decided to buy the new Halo game that comes out in three weeks. Paid in two taps, and was notified that my Xbox at home would be turned on immediately and the game would begin to download. Sure enough I got home and all 65GB had been downloaded.

I paid for a game that will be released in the future and it got to my house before I did. What?

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It amazes me that the new Halo game is 65 GB.

As with most applications, it could be a lot smaller. But storage is so cheap and abundant that size is no longer really a constraint. Consequently, engineering for size is no longer a priority.

4 games would use up the "fair" and "more than enough" bandwidth cap my ISP set :-/

It's either OK internet with caps or vDSL that doesn't really work

Depends where you live.

I'm in the UK I pay for 100/10 I get 200/20 and I have zero bandwidth caps.

Is bandwidth not a concern? 65 GB could take weeks to download.

It could. But then where do you set the limit? At my parents house downloading 5GB of data would take a week. So what is the "reasonable" size? 1GB? 10GB? 50GB? Or maybe we can assume that only people with good enough bandwidth will buy a 65GB game online,and the rest will buy the disc?

> 65 GB could take weeks to download.

If someone lives behind a 1 Mbps home connetion, then yes, about 1 week.

It's possible for it to download compressed data and 323 used uncompressed textures/meshes/sounds/etc.

WOW, me too... I guess it's been a long time since I regularly played games

To be fair, the "new" Halo game is technically the first 4 games all redone for the Xbox One packaged together.

Texture mapping has come a long, long way. It's a shame AAA game mechanics haven't kept up, but, hey, that's a hard problem.

(I just bought Alien: Isolation the other day, and found it disappointing -- silly me, thinking I'd bought a game I could play as I pleased, rather than a movie which would punish me for trying to step outside the predefined narrative it wanted to relate.)

Play Thief Gold or Deus Ex, if you want that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU Obligatory.

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