Gaming

1 TB SSDs are 35-60 dollars.
1 TB HDDs are 22-50 dollars.
2 TB HDDs are 40-65 dollars.
2 TB SDDs are 60-90 dollars.

Clearly, price shouldn't be an issue because one of these drives that give you 10 times the storage is the cost of 1 new release, and the theoretical person who just bought BG3 and Starfield just spent 120 dollars minimum. So theoretical person let's do some math!

Seems really silly to complain that you ran out of space on your PC. Get another drive. If you've filled up your SATA ports, get a PCIe SATA card. If you have all your onboard SATA slots full, plus your PCIe slots are full, plus you've upgraded all the drives you could to at least 1 TB, that typically gives you at least 2-4 TB total. BG3 is taking up 150 GB that you reserved for gaming. Uninstall it if you want to play Starfield. If you don't want to play Starfield that badly then you have your answer.

Clearly, the real answer is that this person needs another drive in their computer. They act like the OS drive is the only thing that could possibly exist in a computer. Worst case, go get a USB 3 drive and toss Starfield on that.

I'm kind of sad about how large games have become and how little goes into optimizing that since "space is cheap"; though it seems people don't really care about the bandwidth (environmental) cost of downloading that now that everything has gone digital (not that I'm saying physical doesn't have waste).

I just kind of wish there were alternates, maybe high-res (free) DLC packs or audio localization packs which I feel like were done in the past but never really became a thing. I find myself sticking to indie games that are only hundreds of MBs instead.

I don't think the article provides any conclusions besides beat games faster to delete them to clear space.

Whom ever wrote this article is a massive idiot.

Baldur's Gate 3 is currently taking up all the storage space I would give to Bethesda's sci-fi RPG.

Damn dude. You only have ~200GB of storage space? Upgrade your HDD/SSD, for real. I don't even review games for a living and I have 2.5TB. I can definitely fit both games. And then some.

This artificial battle of the VASTLY DIFFERENT STYLE RPGs is fucking bizarre and just a made up issue to get clicks, I swear to Christ.

That's a silly excuse. At roughly $20 / TB, a 150gb game shouldn't be an issue

like i usually hate the whole, "buy a 2tb ssd, its only like $60" line. like to a lot of people that isn't something you can just drop casually for a video game (especially on top of the price of the game itself!) but I don't really think thats the perspective this writer is coming from.

Sounds like you need to finish BG3 before starting Starfield.

No space? Lol, clearly you’ve never played ARK Survival Evolved

Content behind an anti-blocker wall. How much space does this game take?

Get an external SSD if you can't open the laptop, Modern laptops will have a fast usb c port available (I use mine for VR).

They also talk about playing ToTK on the laptop too...

"Will Tears of the Kingdom take up the space they otherwise would have occupied?"

I know you can emulate but this writer wtf

There was talk about making "steam deck optimized" versions of games that would ditch high resolution assets as they would be pointless on a 720p display. Nothing seems to have materialized.

That said, there are reasons why games are taking more and more space. Game assets cannot be compressed the same way image files intended for humans can. They have to be stored losslessly, or there WILL be rendering artefacts. And a material or texture in a game is composed of a lot more layers than just an RGB image (normal maps, specular maps, material maps, depth maps). And modern game-engines can pre-bake a lot of things that otherwise would have to be rendered in real-time. That pre-baked render data has to be stored, preferably in high resolution to avoid aliasing, and shipped along with all the other game files.

Games aren't ballooning in size for no reason. Stuff like pre-baking essentially trades storage for the ability to get the same looks for less processing. More data layers in textures and materials allows rendering to take shortcuts in how the appearance of a surface is calculated, etc. etc. etc.

But none of this would prevent the option to not download these resource files for ALL detail levels. If you're not gonna run a game on ultra textures, you don't need those files sitting on your drive.

Honestly I'm much more worried about bullshit fucking Xfinity bandwidth caps than drive space.

I mean, I can kind of understand why giant RPGS like BG3 and Starfield need to be so large, but it just feels like every game nowadays is going to eat up a huge chunk of your storage no matter what it is. With both console and PC games moving to SSD as the standard storage medium, I'm hoping that developers will actually figure out how to optimize for storage space, but I'm not holding my breath.

Baldurs gate 3 is the vetter game anyway soo.. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ my personal plan is to jump on starfield much later when the bugs are fixed and the modding community is matured a little