Civilization VII only needs 20 GB of free disk space | Hacker News Reader

Civilization VII only needs 20 GB of free disk space

corsair.com

16 pointsdoener37 comments

"Only" 20GB. Is that sarcastic, or is that actually low for a videogame these days?

That's actually low. For comparison the latest Call of Duty is upwards of 100GB install size.

This memory monopoly is ridiculous! I have maybe 20 free gigs left on my computer. There has to be something really amazing about COD if I’m ever gonna buy a new PC for it.

Final Fantasy VII is a playstation game on 3 dvds. The remake is splitting it up into three individual games. Part 1 is a tad over 100 GB, part 2 is a tad over 150 GB, so we're at over 250 GB for 2/3rds of the original game. I'm sure part 3 is going to be at least another 150 GB, if not more.

Games have gotten insanely huge.

CD-ROMs, not DVDs, so roughly 650 MB per disc

I don't think its sarcastic at all. I fully expect 100gb for triple a games now.

To name a few, God Of War Ragnarok is 190GB, Baldur's Gate 3 is 150GB, Final Fantasy XV is 150Gb etc.

100GB is more or less expected for big name games nowadays

What happened? Games from 15-20 years ago thst still look and sound fine now (Crysis, MGS2, HL2, San Andreas off the top of my head) all fit on one DVD

>What happened?

Consumers' computers have more space. There was always a trade off between optimizing for disk space and all the other things that go into making a game. As demand for the former has fallen, developers responded accordingly.

Digital downloads are the main form of selling games so developers are not limited by the size of the physical medium (CD, DVD, cartridge etc.)

Also for performance reasons most games are shipped with uncompressed lossless assets which adds up to become huge.

Games are designed to take advantage of the hardware capabilities commonly available in gaming PCs and consoles. If CPU/GPU performance or RAM/storage capacity increases, it's always possible to make a game a little bit better by taking advantage of it.

2 TB SSDs became affordable ~5 years ago, and HDDs of similar size were affordable long before that. Unless you have a laptop from a manufacturer with a pricing model designed to create artificial scarcity of storage space, 100-gigabyte games are not a real issue.

They don't have cut-scenes in 4k HDR though. Even the latest Age of Empires downloads an extra 40GB if you enable 4k HDR. It's nice that they give the option at least.

There is absolutely some bloat in 100gb+ games but also come on, graphics are much better now compared to 15 years old games. Textures + video cinematic + models weight a lot.

Uncompressed high res textures and audio and a lot of unique assets.

When disk space isn’t a problem and with loading times being already rather fast (other than any shader pre-compilations that are CPU bound) there is no penalty to large games.

Not only that but having very large games can be sort of a moat especially on consoles, if you can only have 3 games until your drive gets full you might think twice before uninstalling call of duty to try something new.

And whilst this can also present a barrier to entry the big IPs have enough initial pull to overcome any downsides most likely.

There's actually a pretty wide distribution of video game installation sizes. People are responding to you with the stats of some of the largest games out there, but they aren't normal games. They're AAA open world and FPS games, which are all the way at one end of the distribution. Some new games I've played in the last year are right around 1-2 gigabytes. If I downloaded another Civ-style game, and it was 20 gigabytes, I'd be surprised... but not outraged or shocked.

Exactly! Valheim is only a few GB, for example.

Rumors for GTA6 place it in the 300-600GB range, but who knows

"For the following heist, please turn your game disc over to side B."

The article shows that it's the same 20 GB that Civ VII requires, starting 9 years ago.

The ram requirement has doubled from 8 to 16 GB though

While 20GB would indeed require 55,556 360k floppy disks, a 32GB micro-SD card has a volume of about 164mm^3.

I still think of a megabyte as a lot of memory at some level because it is and that was enough to run approximately every DOS game including the first Civilization...the new one requires a minimum of 16GB RAM, so about the same rate of growth in requirements.

That's neat but I wish the source had more detail on why and how. I know lots of games bloat due to a combination of 1) not caring, and 2) prioritizing loading speed which necessitates less advanced compression. But would still be nice to hear some of the technical details behind it.

20GBs is considered an achievement? why don't all games ship with such size? everybody hates downloading and storing games that have 100+GBs, devs are becoming so lazy it's getting absurd, every game should fit onto 50GB bluray, since we don't have 100TB SSDs in consumer PCs yet

So, this is just an ad for things made by Corsair that they cover under the suggestions of improving game play

I only just learned through this article that the game will have ray tracing. That's sick. Are there any other RT strategy games?

Civilization isn’t a RTS game.

Edit: I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. Covid games are turn based strategy games.

Ray tracing, not real-time strategy.

Thank you!

I love the Civ games but it always blows my mind how heavy a turn-based game can be on system resources.

I actually agree, I know the simulations are complex, and I'm sure there's _way_ more to it than I think.

But I have an extremely high end CPU and taking turns in the late game takes way longer than I would expect.

There's only so many possible actions I can take during my turn, is there no way to pre-compute the resulting changes to game state during my turn in the background?

I think your answer is found more in the AI. Any gains from pruning unlikely/impossible scenarios are usually spent on greater search depth*, and late game scenarios tend to have 1) more units in play and 2) higher stakes on a single move. Pre-computing during your turn would actually result in more compute, because the optimal choice for the AI after Unit A moves may change drastically once you've moved Unit B.

[*]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-beta_pruning.

> But I have an extremely high end CPU and taking turns in the late game takes way longer than I would expect.

If you disable the animations it actually goes pretty quick. I can even play Civ 6 on my old Thinkpad.

It's not actually as calculation taxing as games like Cities Skylines which actually run a simulation - the CPU draw is mostly just feeding the insane number of things that have to be rendered by the GPU.

Just curious, why do you find it surprising? Turn-based games tend to have hefty simulations fueling environmental factors, as well as expansive decision trees for AI to search through. Even the prettiest shooters are (comparatively) linear in play style, with AI that doesn't do much more than try to flank you.

It's a result of making the game match the MSRP. To justify charging $140(!) for what's still essentially a PC port of a board game, they have to embellish the hell out of the game with textures/animations/voice acting, etc.

I remember playing this one on the amiga 500 when it was maybe just 1 disk? Still the best version I have played. Fantastic game.

CIV I on Amiga was 4 disks. You had to switch disks whenever a leader animation loaded. I shared computer time with my siblings and always asked for my time slot to start once the game had loaded as it took forever to load!

Breath of the wild is 13.4GB

Hard to compare, BoTW does not even have any human voices. So that means audio goes close to nothing. The textures are very low, so no need to waste much on that. My guess Surround Audio, plus the High definition Textures take a lot of space. Compare for example Diablo IV, which gives you an option to download 1/2 of the game size if you don't need high resolution textures. 45GB vs 90GB.

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