Has anyone noticed any correlation in recent years between game file sizes and fidelity?

Tell me I'm overthinking this all you want, but with games moving past the 20GB, 30GB, all the way up to the 70GB mark, I was hoping to hear everyone's theories, both experienced and inexperienced to game design, as to what takes up so much space, and what certain factors may affect the file size in general, such as open world games vs linear titles. ^^; Let's all have a bit of fun here.

It's actually not the game files. Developers are secretly using your computer as a porn server.

I already saw 76 GB with X-Plane 9 back in 2009. Most of it is scenery for the whole world. I once had so many addons for Flight Simulator X, I had its folder size at 50+ GB at a time when most PC games never exceeded 10 GB.

Content and everything else take up space. There's no way around it. That said, 2 and 4 TB hard drives are relatively cheap.

Textures are usually very compressed and/or low res to match console standards so it's mostly uncompressed audio(which is waste) and worthless language files(an even bigger waste)

DOOM is the perfect example of this.80GB for a 5 hour game.

What a ginormous waste of time and space.Meanwhile a game like Fallout 4 that has 1000x the content is 1/4 the size.

Yeah, Doom is a huge waste of space for the short game that it is. I do get digital games if i can see them cheap enough but for doom i'll have to wait for a physical disc of it to go on sale cause to download 60-80 gb on my crap internet would take me around a month and cost me about 80 dollars of over usage penalities. For a game that short, the value for myself would place it at 20-30 dollars, not that i care if i ever get it either since im not into fps games much anymore but would try it for a cheap enough price.

It'd also be nice if they'd offer different versions of the game to download like ones with compressed 1080p textures and below, and also options of ac3 or mp3 audio quality instead of uncompressed pcm or dts audio. I'm fine with playing a 5 hr game with mp3 quality sounds, i don't want to spend 80 dollars of bandwidth ontop of another 60+ dollars for the game for just a few hours of entertainment.

I also completely missed out on Rise of Tomb Raider at its release because of this also until several months later i found a UK import version of the game that had a physical release on pc. No idea at all why they didn't make a physical release in north america of a game with a file size that big. Not everyone has access to fast fibre internet or unlimited bandwidth.

Theres so much push to make everything digital yet not everyone doesn't has high enough quality internet to download games that are now 80gbs and rising... in a few more years games are going to be hitting easily 100+ gb as the norm.

prolly caused by cutscenes and the inclusion of multiple audio languages

Why is language files a waste? Aren't people that don't speak English allowed to play games in their own language? What needs to happen is have the option of installing what language you want (some games have that).

As for Fallout 4, it's using an old engine and to be honest doesn't hold up that great today and is buggy, hence why it's a small install.

Doom 5 hours? It took me well over 30 hours, probably closer to 40 hours.

The guy who did the 5-hr run is called Zero Master. If you're as good as him, let's see you post a video doing your own 5-hr run.

Most players are probably like me who stumble my way across each level, finding anything that'll help build up my health and ammo capacity because there's something worse and nastier up ahead.

That would be cool

I don't think the huge jump in game install size has directly translated into higher fidelity visuals. It seems like many developers have gotten lazy now that we have more memory on both consoles and PC. There is less of a need to use as many compression techniques.

I'm 8 hours into Doom and on like the third or fourth level. I'm exploring and trying to collect stuff because I see speed runs as pointless.

It's not just visuals either, it's mostly CONTENT.

Take an open world game for example 20 years ago compared to now where you have a huge map with lots of assets and things going on on TOP of the better visuals. Then you have most games using full audio dialogue, plenty more gameplay varieties, higher grade cutscenes etc etc.

It all adds up.

With 4k on the horizon, we'll prolly see games requiring over 100 gigs.