MMO File Sizes are Getting Ridiculous

It goes without saying, I think, to anyone who has been gaming actively for more than a decade, that we’ve come a very long way in a number of respects. From graphical quality, audio and voice overs, music, and general design, video games are becoming rapidly more and more sophisticated. The medium is becoming respectable and acceptable to the mainstream populate that, less then five years ago, would have dismissed the entire hobby as something solely for children. But, with this increase in quality comes a price: the actual size of games, in a digital sense, has become ENORMOUS.

Tera - Looks beautiful but requires 40GB of HD space

Some of us might remember the days when it was amazing to have a hard drive bigger than 60 gigabytes. What could anyone possibly do with all that space, we might have wondered. In the late 90′s, PC games almost always ran with the disc accompanying them, so actual hard drive installation sizes were reduced. The speed of one’s CD-ROM was actually a pretty large factor in determining load times and general game experience. These days, we seem to have forgotten where we’ve come from. With the enormous success of MMORPGs and digital downloads, and the widespread acceptance of mediums through which to purchase digital games (mainly Steam), gaming has never been easier or more accessible. Or has it?

When we’re on an unlimited bandwidth, high-speed connection, we tend to look at a large download as a momentary inconvenience. A few hours, maybe. At worst, we leave the PC on overnight while the client is copied to our computer. There are some of us, however, that have to be accessing the internet on a limited connection, usually because of our remote location. In these situations, either the connection is less than ideal, or it’s fast, but we’re given a certain limit to how much data we can download before the ISP starts to charge us for excess activity. Sometimes, it’s both. Either way, not everyone has the luxury of a completely unlimited, high-speed ISP. This can make extremely large file sizes a problem.

Aion - Another 40GB MMORPG

And the clients are definitely getting larger. Much larger. Cabal 2 and Skyforge are both about 10GB in size. Funcom's Age of Conan is a whopping 27 GB in size. Don't worry, it gets even bigger! Star Wars: The Old Republic is an initial 27.5GB download, but fully patched is a bit higher. 27.5 GB for a single game! Elder Scrolls Online is a whopping ~43GB in size! Filesizes are only going to get bigger and bigger too. Star Citizen is expected to be over 100GB in size by the time it fully launches. To some people in many parts of the world, shoving a game of this magnitude through their ISP is like trying to stuff a battleship through a garden hose. So the next time you’re groaning about the latest game taking a whole three hours to download, during which you can’t stream movies or play other things at optimal capacity, try to think about people who live in a more remote place, where downloading that client puts them halfway towards their bandwidth limit for the month. We can become so spoiled, can’t we?

So the obvious question after all of this is how has increasing client size affected you as an online gamer? Does it really bother you that much? Are you someone who has to deal with a limited or slow internet connection because of your location? If so, what are some solutions or games that have made themselves especially efficient or accessible in terms of client size that you like? And what exactly do we think all of that dataspace is going towards, anyways? In the end, is it worth it? Or are we willing to make due with less? Discuss!