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

[Tigrone]

Is 15 Gigs the free space needed to play, or is this the install size? 15 Gigs seems a lot if it's mainly an online game?

I'm afraid my old desktop does not meet the minimum spec, and my laptop will just barely meet them. This is looking expensive to upgrade too, even without the continuous connection problem, for an old retired Army guy.

Recommended system configuration
CPU: Intel® Core2Duo® E6850 or AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 5600+ or higher
Operating System: Windows® XP (with Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista® (with Service Pack 2) or Windows® 7
RAM: 2 GB (XP / Vista / Win7)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM speed 4x, dual-layer drive
Recommended Drive Space: 15 GB
Video Card: 512 MB DirectX® 9.0c-compliant video card (ATI® Radeon HD3000 series / GeForce® 9 Series or better)
Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0c-compliant sound card
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (included on disc)

[Sailor Steve]

It's not mainly an online game.




You just have to be online to play it.

[Iron Budokan]

Yeah, it's really not an online game. World of Warcraft is an online game, and therefore you need to be online to play it. Kinda makes sense. This is a solo game...that you have to be online to play.

I know.

[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.

[Brag]

You have to be online because it is not an online game that you play online. Ypu must be online though you don't need to be online but Ubi wants you to be online even if you don't want to be online. Is that online clear?

My wallet is shut

Moo!

[Sailor Steve]

Oh, Balz!

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Brag

You have to be online because it is not an online game that you play online. Ypu must be online though you don't need to be online but Ubi wants you to be online even if you don't want to be online.

Mai head jus' esploded.

[Kimmers]

Arent games getting bigger, eh. according to the Sh5 website sh5 will take up 10gb of space apparently.

this better be brilliant, looks like im gonna have to pull some stuff off my machine to make room.

[jerm138]

Hard drives have gotten so cheap, it shouldn't be an issue.

I recently bought a 1TB WD Caviar for $100 and change.

[Highbury]

My rFactor install is over 35gb... hell my SHIV has almost 20 of mods! 10 isn't bad.

[Ducimus]

Im guessing voices and dialog options, with some higher res texture files in DDS format. Audio files are the ones that are the least compresson friendly and take up the most drive space. Next runner up is texture files.

[Galanti]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

Im guessing voices and dialog options, with some higher res texture files in DDS format. Audio files are the ones that are the least compresson friendly and take up the most drive space. Next runner up is texture files.

Especially if there is a special soup for each day of the week, and each soup's texture clocks in an eye-popping 4096x4096 pixels.

I suspect you're right Ducimus, the greatly expanded interaction with the crew probably means there will be arseloads of dialog files.