Fancy that, Size on disk 10-15 Gb (merged)

[Boris]

These kinds of system requirements is just where games are headed...it's just the natural progression of things. 15 gigs is pretty huge, but not unacceptable in this day and age. Hard drive space is cheap.

As for the internet requirement... yeah, that sucks

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by Boris

These kinds of system requirements is just where games are headed...it's just the natural progression of things. 15 gigs is pretty huge, but not unacceptable in this day and age. Hard drive space is cheap.

As for the internet requirement... yeah, that sucks

HHDs are very cheap, but its a pain in the ass replacing the system disk
and shifting all my data around

Last year I replaced my aging 80GB c:\ system drive with my 300GB movie drive. and replaced that a with a new 500GB...
Now i need to replace my 160GB RAID 1 disks with a pair of 1TBs
I just used them for Data that I really dont want to lose - like 3d work, mp3s etc, but they are almost full.

[Panser]

Originally Posted by Boris

These kinds of system requirements is just where games are headed...it's just the natural progression of things. 15 gigs is pretty huge, but not unacceptable in this day and age. Hard drive space is cheap.

Consider also that if you go back a decade, typical games had a comparatively larger footprint on the HDD than they do now.

Figuring that, as long as you are buying or building more than a budget system, a mid-spec desktop system would likely come with a 1TB drive, maybe even larger. A 15GB game therefore takes 1.5-2% of your HDD space once overheads and the cheeky metric capacity system manufacturers use are considered. Wind back ten years and you would be looking at 400-500MB being a fairly typical large game install size, with larger multiple-CD games potentially taking more.

Consider that a typical hard disk in the year 2000 was about 10-20GB and factor in the same losses as above (file allocation tables and metric to binary capacity conversion), a typical game footprint would be nearer 2.5-3% of the total HDD capacity.

Sure 15GB is a huge amount of data, but as consumers demand tastier visuals those textures are only going to get bigger and more numerous.
However, if you compare the demands of games to a contemporaneous PC, if anything, requirements are falling.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Panser

Figuring that, as long as you are buying or building more than a budget system, a mid-spec desktop system would likely come with a 1TB drive, maybe even larger.

Sigh, I remember when DEC came out with one of the first commercial hard drives (1981, I think). It held 5 MB and cost about $5,000. I remember thinking to myself 5 MB? There is no way an individual would ever need to save 5 MB of data.