Coming off the back of the L.A Noire file-size post comes more concerning news. The upcoming WWE 2K18 for the Nintendo Switch will require a 24GB download for the physical version. There’s still no release date for the game on the Nintendo Switch, but you will certainly need an SD Card for third-party games going forward.
Ye
Probably a deal breaker for me. If I bite now, it’ll likely be for PC.
I wasn’t going to buy the game but it is large and unfortunate. But I have plenty of micro SDs, so if i do go for this game, it won’t matter to me.
Jesus Christ. L.A Noire is required less than half of this which it should’ve fit in the highest standard cartridge but this….hell no. Are these devs that fucking lazy and cheap to fit the entire goddamn games into one cartridge?
The portable, solid state storage necessary for the Switch is not cost effective enough for the price point of a home console, which means that downloading part of the game is not an acceptable option. Unfortunately this game is larger than the biggest cart size that Nintendo offers. Something needs to change fast for these bloated games to actually sell on the Switch.
The only acceptable compromise I can think of in this BS scenario BY CHEAP LAZY ASS 3RD PARTIES, is to offer both physical and digital versions of the game at one price. There’s no way in hell that games like these require almost an entirety of the game size to be downloaded. We might as well buy the fucking digital version for that matter but nobody likes digital much unless it makes sense for the ecosystem. This doesn’t. Nintendo should bring out the 64GB version of the cartridges to stop this stupid ass lazy trend of 3rd parties. It’s like they never heard of “compression”before and just go full out on these games that are heavily lesser in scope and features than games like Breath of the Wild. How the fuck 2K claims they can’t fit or won’t afford a 32GB cart to fit a 25GB basketball game that has one fucking arena with cosmetic changes and a roster of dozens of players? I highly doubt that shit like that can take up so much space which it shouldn’t. How come a huge game like Zelda can cramp so much in just less than 16GB? I swear these 3rd parties are fucking reckless with their work.
This one is larger than the 32gb max, I believe. And I’m going to go ahead and assume you don’t have experience in game development, because it’s not laziness. Yes, this could probably have been made to compress smaller, but these developers have had no reason to focus on that, since we’ve had a decade of relatively cheap storage for home consoles. Suddenly, we have this portable storage thing on the market that wants the same games as the home consoles, and the only one who has had any practice making games in a small space has been Nintendo. And if the game isn’t made from the ground up for the smaller storage space of the Switch, porting it and compressing it down starts to get tricky.
Remember that Nintendo’s biggest games still use minimal audio tracks (Nintendo doesn’t exactly do a lot of voice recording), and they use relatively simple textures, and those are the two biggies taking up space. Their company-wide game design lends itself to smaller file sizes. But Nintendo’s portable hybrid has put the rest of the world in a really tough spot and something, probably cost of solid state storage, needs to change quickly, because games are only going to keep getting bigger.
Now there’s certainly been publishers deciding to cut costs by going with the cheaper cartridge and shoving the rest of the game onto a download, and yeah that’s a problem. But as games are being made larger and larger, 32gb maximum is simply not going to cut it, no matter how much magical compression people want to exist.
It’s why I said either do 2 for 1 pricing or go for making a 64GB option while making those cartridges cheaper to manufacture. As for the third parties, they are lazy by default and only wanna make a quick buck instead of making quality games.But at the same time, time is the essence, I know this. It’s still no excuse to take shortcuts like this. Also, how hard is it to compress? Is it as hard as making a game?
Well like all things, compression has limits and how small you can get it is all about the algorithm you use. With games, it has to be lossless compression, which means bigger files than lossy compression Plus, the more you compress, the longer the game takes to decompress. You can’t have a game take an 10 minutes to decompress just to fit on a small cartridge. But ultimately, big textures and lots of audio are going to mean a big file size. If Breath of the Wild had full voice acting and realistic textures, it probably wouldn’t fit on one of their own cartridges.
As for making better compression algorithms? It’s actually really crazy and complex, and these algorithms come from people who have studied years of information theory, which makes my head explode. And if you were to come up with a better compression algorithm, that algorithm has value and you’d keep others from using it without your permission.
Who is gonna pay for that cartridge exactly?
Just cut the frills out and make a game 16 GB large in size. Cutscenes, FMV, very large textures. If people want that ‘WWE game’ they will do without the frills. Many people will appreciate the fact that will be portable and available to their console.
And let’s stop to moan on games not ‘PS4 features-like’. Fifa is good as it is on the Switch, even with moaners.
Thank frogopus, for saying what I was going to say :-D
Just to add to what you said, I think those who aren’t familiar with programming or game development think that compression comes free. A lot of games could benefit greatly from using more high-compression algorithms like LZMA or Z Standard but they can require a large amount of memory and CPU time. This is why I think it was mistake for Nintendo to go with an off-the-shelf SoC for the Switch. A custom chip could have had either better CPU cores (A72) or ideally it would have some of these algorithms implemented in-hardware.
For example, people have implemented LZMA into FPGA’s before and they resulted in 10x increases in decompression. Imagine what kind of speeds they could get with Z Std which is already pretty fast on CPUs. It wouldn’t compress as well as LZMA but devs would be able to use it pretty liberally without fear of increased load times.
Even Nintendo would have benefitted from something like that because Breath of the Wild could have shipped on an 8GB card with room to spare.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this mean that game is simply unplayable? Because the switch doesn’t allow to save game data on sd cards and this would basically consume the console’s entire internal storage.
Lol at the size. Now I know why third parties don’t want to bring the games on the console. ^^
Some games aren’t exactly optimized for a Switch life.
Yes they can if we buy sd cards. We like or not. People want expand internal memory but it will cost more. People want External HDD but only you will play those games at home like a console and not hybrid like the 50% of the people vs 20% home console and 30% handled (eventually they will update to do that but not for the moment). Black Friday is coming anyways so just buy a micro sd card that day. And people will buy th sd cards anyways. In my case I really need a 256gb that day if a I want some big games digital with my 128gb for Indies and mario games with less than 10gb file size only
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Is there an actual source for where the forum poster got that image? I think this is click-bait.
Why would a physical game require a download? I’m confused. This sounds like Switch killing news. I’m sick of memory/storage issues with video games. Even with my PS4 and it’s 500GB hard drive, I keep having to delete my saved games in order to play new ones. I hate that. And the Switch has an even more ridiculous problem. A problem that’s going to kill my interest in the console.
Game cases for the Switch should have and extra little slot inside for micro SD cards to be stored. Same way that Gamecube cases had slots for memory cards.
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External HDD support can’t come soon enough. The longer it takes, the more expensive the Switch is going to become for people that don’t have a PS4 or XBox One as they’ll have to settle for the far more expensive Micro SD Cards since external HDD support isn’t an alternative option for those that prefer to have a big library on their video game system at the expensive of portability. The problem with a measly 32gb that Nintendo settled for for the Switch & no external HDD support as an alternative that should have been available alongside Micro SD Cards on day 1 of the Switch’s release is finally starting to rear it’s ugly, hideous head. I fucking knew it was coming. But no! People were like “But it uses cartridges! Day 1 downloads & updates won’t happen now!” Even fucking Nintendo games have day 1 downloads & updates! They also said “Unless you plan to go digital only, you shouldn’t have any problems.” Yeah. Sure. Then I guess what I’m seeing right now is all in my head.
It’s 32gb because of the cost for more. Now, you could argue 64gb wouldn’t be that much more cost, but we’d still be having the same conversation because that’s still not enough storage. You need at LEAST 500gb of storage for a modern console. My PC needs terabytes just for games. But the difference between an iPad with 64gb storage and one with 512gb is $350, more than the entire cost of the Switch. Storage on solid states is just too expensive right now.
Yes, I’d love external support and will put a terabyte right next to the dock if it comes, but that will make for an awkward hiccup in their “it just works” hybrid design. Suddenly, I have a portion of my games unavailable in handheld, which may be fine for some but its far from an elegant solution. I genuinely think Nintendo sees little difference in changing out a game cart and changing out an SD card full of games, so they prefer that solution (honestly, I do too).
And carts had to happen. You can’t put a cd drive or a hdd on a tablet. A hybrid demands compromise, and this is it. I’m just happy it hasn’t happened with a game that I’d have bought anyways.
Well I pity everyone that is gonna be getting most of their games on Switch. I hope they don’t mind paying expensive prices for micro SD cards or don’t mind having to delete updates every time they want to play a different game & redownload them when they want to play the game they deleted again. Playing games on Switch is about to get all kinds of convoluted.
How exactly does a wrestling game need 24 gigs, ON TOP of the files on a physical cartridge?
I don’t play wrestling games or watch wrestling, but I fail to see how programming said game requires such large amounts of memory unless there’s like 200 fighters, and even then I bet there are ways to minimize how much those take up.
You got around 100 wrestlers, maybe more, with their own special entrances, theme music, mannerisms, & moves. You got a ton of different stages, titan trons, rings, & arenas from very small to football stadium big. You got literally hundreds upon hundreds of customization options for created wrestlers & created arenas. Not to mention the graphics themselves. WWE games need a lot more data than you think.
Crap! I forgot the customization options for creating your own titles, too!
The customization options are very freaking extensive. They probably take up most of the GBs. Hundreds upon hundreds might not be the best description of the amount of customization options in the game. It’s probably more like thousands upon thousands of options. @.@ I got WWE 2k17. The amount of stuff in the game is freaking insane. @.@
I’m honestly surprised the game isn’t take up even MORE data. @.@
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Meanwhile, In Xbox Land: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-03-xbox-one-x-comes-hand-in-hand-with-massive-downloads