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Comment by rvba | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard us a bad example. Their games take incredible amounts of time to start. I think they dont play their own games and nobody gives a shit.

The launcher is bugged and downloads either empty or 137mb patches (maybe bad CRC at some server? Different CRCs at some?). Every time.

Starcraft remastered was bugged at some point and couldnt be played for a week.

If you statt Heroes of the storm, it takes few minutes to download some 600 byte ghost patch, then does some (antihack?) processing... then you can start the queue after like 10 minutes.

It's probably like the GTA5 that also took ages to start due to poorly done code and devs not caring at all.

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Your experience is not my experience at all. Blizzard is the gold standard for me in starting games faster than any other launcher. In fact they are the only one I’ve seen that lets you play the game part way into the download. No other dev seems to have this technology.

I waited hours to play Witcher 3, Cuberpunk, Assassins Creed Odyssey. With WoW I was playing within minutes.

Other games have 'start with partial download' technology. In fact, the core tech of the team that eventually created Valve's Steam was downloading assets on-the-fly so that you could start playing a game before everything was downloaded.

I worked on Guild Wars 2, which has this feature. I made a first prototype of it that streamed all content on-the-fly. It's pretty easy to implement - you have an abstraction that asynchronously loads a file off of the disk, and you can just make that download from the network instead.

The tricky part is when you want to ensure all the assets are there for a specific area before you load in, or simply knowing what order to download things in. For example, there was a starter area of Guild Wars 2 that spawned monsters from many other areas, this meant that the manifest of what was needed was enormous for that area.

So the 'playability' threshold becomes a trade-off between game experience (assets popping in as you play) and quick entry.

Guild Wars 2 needs more respect from the MMO community. The ability to do testing on the live servers, or enable patches with a client reboot and no server downtime, is great.

Guild Wars 2, EverQuest 2 also allow launching after a relatively small (maybe 10%) base amount of data has been downloaded. Its never ideal IMO as it creates longer loading times to areas not already downloaded, but I appreciate that its an option.

In the Beyond All Reason (still "alpha") RTS, the game itself is only a couple Go, but maps are downloaded on the fly, because downloading all of the featured ones would take a dozen Go.

what is 'Go' as a unit? size? time?

Probably Giga-octets. Either French or very formal.

gigaoctets

You waited hours... to play those games? From double clicking the icon to launch? I find that extremely hard to believe.

If you include download time, even that doesn't hold up to your claim.

Assassins creed odyssey was apparently 44-50GB at launch. That’s 3 hours @ 45 megabits/second.

This is not an uncommon internet download speed even today (let alone 5 years ago when it launched) according to the steam download stats (it varies by country, check australia for example, US is a little over 100 average): https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

Even at 100Mb, 45GB is 1 hour. Witcher 3 looks to be about 30GB but Cyberpunk is apparently 70-100GB.

Do the math next time :)

I regularly needed multiple hours (sometimes up to 12) to download large games until 2-3 years ago. So he's definitely correct.

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