Is this the largest game ever?

[Rob Williams]

No, unfortunately, I don't mean largest as in game world. Rather, largest as in how much space it takes up on a hard drive. I thought I saw the biggest before, at around 12 or 13GB, but Napoleon: Total War puts even that one to shame:



Does anyone know of a game that games up more hard drive space than this?

 

[DarkStarr]

Wow.... Thats MASSIVE, the largest I have is MW2 at a bit over 11 Gb

 

[Altrus]

Hmmm....The closest thing I have is Dragon Age Origins at 16 GB....17GB if you include the Game Files in Documents.
I think its hilarious when I remember that my first computer's HDD was only 2GB.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Add mods into the equation, and you can have 30-40GB games. Worse still, most of these games are actually compressed already when on the hard drive, they need further decompression at run time (hence the insane load times on some titles). Then the icing on the cake is as Altrus says, MyDocuments for save games, temp files, config, screenshots, movies, patches, downloads for DLC, etc, etc. Just because the game directory is 21GB, doesn’t mean the entire game install is 21Gb, lol.

Anyone that’s played Unreal Tournament will know the pain of mods and the massive file sizes that can come with them. Few years back with UT 2003/4, I had over 30GB of mods tucked away, the game install directory was something like 68GB at one point (most of it uncompressed duplicates). Although the worst offenders are Beta’s. If you ever get invited to a closed beta, make sure you have a lot of free space, while I was part of one, I had a download directory 120GB, install of 19GB and 5GB of temporary, not to mention 100’s of screenshots and fraps video’s.

 

[Axm]

I reckon Age of Conan is one of the biggest out there all though Napoleon total war is really close

 

[Doomsday]

Hmmm....The closest thing I have is Dragon Age Origins at 16 GB....17GB if you include the Game Files in Documents.
I think its hilarious when I remember that my first computer's HDD was only 2GB.

DA:Origins is pretty huge, add all the DLCs and expansion!

 

[Rob Williams]

I think its hilarious when I remember that my first computer's HDD was only 2GB.

Same here! I remember when Duke Nukem 3D came out, and I had a 500MB hard drive. I was SO stoked that I knew I'd be able to install the game some 16 times if I wanted to. Of course that's pointless, but it helped me feel like I had a ton of storage back then, haha.

Add mods into the equation, and you can have 30-40GB games.

Mods don't count! We're talking about pure virgin games here, straight installs.

Worse still, most of these games are actually compressed already when on the hard drive, they need further decompression at run time (hence the insane load times on some titles). Then the icing on the cake is as Altrus says, MyDocuments for save games, temp files, config, screenshots, movies, patches, downloads for DLC, etc, etc. Just because the game directory is 21GB, doesn’t mean the entire game install is 21Gb, lol.

Regarding decompression, given how long it takes a level to load on Napoleon: Total War, I believe that to be true. It takes at least a minute, though I haven't actually timed it. And regarding your last part, I'd say it's still 21GB, because as soon as you leave the game, it remains 21GB. It might decompress during gameplay, but the user isn't going to see the real effect of that, unless they are running on almost no free hard drive space. That's rare today given storage prices.

I reckon Age of Conan is one of the biggest out there all though Napoleon total war is really close

First off, welcome to the forums! Kudos for beating me at my own "game" ;-)

My interest is piqued though... is there actually a game out there that's even worse in this regard than these two games? I'm starting to think there probably is, but I can't think of what it might be...

 

[Axm]

First off, welcome to the forums! Kudos for beating me at my own "game" ;-)

My interest is piqued though... is there actually a game out there that's even worse in this regard than these two games? I'm starting to think there probably is, but I can't think of what it might be...

Thanks for the welcome!

I do also think there are bigger games out there ill keep an eye out though just out of interest

 

[Altrus]

Anyone know how much Dragon Age is with Awakening installed? Since it requires the original to play we can count them together right?

 

[Rob Williams]

It seems fair that expansion packs could be considered, given it's still all one big game and not stand-alone.

Thanks to a 1.2GB patch released for Napoleon: Total War just today, the folder's total size is now 22.3GB!

 

[Kougar]

Regarding decompression, given how long it takes a level to load on Napoleon: Total War, I believe that to be true. It takes at least a minute, though I haven't actually timed it. And regarding your last part, I'd say it's still 21GB, because as soon as you leave the game, it remains 21GB. It might decompress during gameplay, but the user isn't going to see the real effect of that, unless they are running on almost no free hard drive space. That's rare today given storage prices.

You should test it, any game that takes a minute or more to load would be great for SSD testing. I don't own any of those, alas...

I think Tharic's point was that it was 21GB even though many of the files are already compressed... I may be wrong on this, but I thought games extracted heavily compressed files within the Temp directly. Or at least that's where my AV extracts them when unpacking EA game archive files...

 

[CaptainFluffy]

The largest game I have is The Last Remnant using about 12gb. I'm running out of hard drive space anyway.

 

[DarkStarr]

Who can be running out of disk space in these times? I have somewhere around 2310 GB in my machine, don't recall how much used, on a laptop now so cant check.

 

[madstork91]

A sad byproduct of more and larger textures being used in games these days.

Ive noticed that these sizes seem to double at most every 4-5 years too.

Who is ready for the 40gb game?!

 

[Kougar]

Who can be running out of disk space in these times? I have somewhere around 2310 GB in my machine, don't recall how much used, on a laptop now so cant check.

The irony is rich... but truth be told anyone using an SSD has to worry about disk space, just as if we were back to the era when 120GB was considered huge and most PC's shipped with 40GB drives all over again. I always thought 60GB was sufficient, but it's not. Unless I uninstall/reinstall games frequently I can have just that much installed from a handful of PC games alone. Then there is all the productivity programs like Office, Photoshop, various programs I use daily, and of course ~20GB for the OS... Honestly even 120GB feels highly confining to me now, and I even store all my data on a slave hard drive!

I haven't even mentioned virtualization... VMware images can get massive, I've had one small Linux image (the Linux disk was configured to only be 8GB) that ballooned to a whopping 28GB on the real disk. I am not entirely sure why, but soon as my SSD ran out of room the virtual machine errored and the virtual disk corrupted itself. It had been split into 5 dependent files and VMware couldn't recover the fifth file to rebuild the master image file. That was simply irritating.