John2290 said:
Airaku said:
I still don't understand how Nintendo compresses their games so well. I have some theories but their file sizes are always beyond small, other developers struggle to compress the way they do. It's almost magical. In case for Breath of the Wild, the art style allows you to use the lowest possible size of textures. It's absolutely crazy, did you know that Wind Waker HD is only 2.6 GB? Where Twilight Princess HD is 4.51 GB? Those are both decent size games in terms of length but the textures of Twilight Princess and minus the empty spaces make it much larger. Bethesda is also quite decent at compressing as well imho. They aren't as efficient as Nintendo, but they are within the realms of believability and attainability. I think Nintendo uses a lot of tricks in terms of known the own hardware that they created to offset some tricks. I mean Pikmin 3 looks beautiful in terms of graphics and textures and the game is only 3.85 GB. There are demos with much larger file sizes than that and look considerably worse graphically and in terms of textures. Textures are a huge factor in file size. This is why the HD era saw such a massive jump in file sizes.
tl;dr: Breath of the Wild is HUGE with it's massive 13.5 GB size in terms of Nintendo file sizes. They are very efficient when they compress their games and this is their biggest game to date by a long shot.
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It isn't about how they compress it, it is about the development process and being maticulous. Everyone could do it but most games end up with patch work that requires massive ammounts of crap to be left in. You mentioned Bethesda but I think that is the reuse of assets and the usually "less than decent graphics". There games tend to be built like a house of cards becuase of that engine.
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Having worked with Skyrim quite a lot in the modding scene, it's very much down to use of assets more than almost anything else. And this likely is a reason other games bloat: they don't make clever use of assets. Bethesda is actually very good at gauging what the average person will and won't spot in terms of repeated assets. And so they reuse quite a lot and instead focus on scene composition as a means of visual variation. Nintendo does similar things with Zelda (and likely will here too) to varying degrees. Meanwhile a lot od these bloated games likely have a ton of asset variation that essentially no one notices.
