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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!

Yes. High resolution textures take up a lot of space. Have a look at HD texture mods for skyrim for example. 23GB is more in line with a game from a few years ago, so this really is slim for a modern game with modern graphics.

Back in the day:

> 3-D Hardware Accelerator (with 16MB VRAM with full OpenGL® support; Pentium® II 400 Mhz processor or Athlon® processor; English version of Windows® 2000/XP Operating System; 128 MB RAM; 16-bit high color video mode; 800 MB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files (Minimum Install), plus 300 MB for the Windows swap file […]

* https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/Return_to_Castle_Wol...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein

Even older games would be even smaller:

* https://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/ultima-vi-the-false-prophet/...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_VI:_The_False_Prophet

I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...

For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.

The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:

Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.

Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.

Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.

Further there is PDF software (read, write) that often does the same things that is much less heavy.

In this day and age it's a gift to only be ~23GB.. I'm reminded of the old days when you literally didn't have the space so had to get creative, now any kind of space optimization isn't even considered.

Not true at all on my PlayStation. Just a few games with 100GB+ install size can quickly put you into a space juggling scenario.

Have you played a big budget video game released in the last 10 years? It’s pretty standard to reach upwards of 60GB.

GTAV had a 60GB install size over a decade ago.

I do love rich soundtracks with high quality compression, and textures that look crisp on 4k. And also games with 100+ hours of single-player campaign.

Well yes? Have you played the game? It's got lot of content and is very pretty.

Those high resolution textures will just take space. You could obviously decrease the graphical fidelity but I'd guess that most players (me very much included) would rather play a very pretty 23GB Helldivers II than a 5GB ugly Helldivers II.

150GB was very annoying, ironically forcing me to install it to a HDD. 23GB isn't even worth thinking about for me.

It can fit on a standard blu ray, so I'm inclined to say so

I mean yes, it's a very nice looking game with fairly sizeable worlds and lots of different enemies, biomes, etc.

It's currently over 100GB because of duplicated assets, so this is a game-changer (pun intended).

EDIT: Just checked; 157GB on my SSD.

EDIT2: 26GB after updating with a 9.7GB download, 5.18GB of shaders before and after.

It's tiny, compared to most games of similar graphical detail.

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