JRPGfan said:
curl-6 said:
In an age where AAA games have become insanely bloated, I love that Nintendo still keeps their games to a nice manageable size.
Granted, it's easier for them to do so when they tend not to lean into super hi-res textures or extensive voice acting, but still, it's much appreciated, given even similar games on other platforms can be much less trim; Crash Bandicoot 4 on PS4 was 45GB for instance.
To date, Nintendo's biggest game ever is still Xenoblade Chronicles X which weighed in at 22GB; even Tears of the Kingdom weighs in at just 16GB.
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The thing is if Playstation or Xbox tried to do simular, they would be called out for it.
Game doesn't need voice acting, we'll go with text bubbles and squeeky noises to signal someone is saying something.
Imagine how much space that takes up, playstation games sometimes have voice acting in like 14+ differnt languages.
Case in point, Crash bandicoot 4 (since you mentioned it), by activisions toys for bob, is fully localised in 9 differnt languges (ei. voice acting in all 9).
(xbox now)
Meanwhile I believe Xenoblade Chronicles X, only has English and Japanese voices, otherwise its all just text + english.
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo decided to voice another 10 languages, that alone could add another 10 GB to the game or such.
If Nintendo decided to use higher resolution textures, again... its size would grow.
Its not nintendo magic that keeps something like Xenoblade Chronicles X, at a smaller size, but choices, not to do more work than is needed.
Which again, might be a good topic now with balooning game developement budgets ect.
Nintendo are just "sensible" to a degree that Xbox and Playstation are not.
They go out of their way to do all this extra work, to bring you "lifelike" games with great localisation... and it costs.
Nintendo get away with alot of it by being smart about it though.
Instead of chaseing ultra realism, and doing something they likely cant match xbox or playstation in, and have hardware limiting them, they go another direction. Something they are master at instead, with their own artstyle and a more cartoony look. Nintendo don't view these things that make games gigantic in size, as important. However the fact remains, its not nintendo magic that makes their games smaller, but design choices and cost cutting. |
Xenoblade Chronicles X has massively more VA than Crash 4 does due to the kind of game it is though; a massive 100-hour RPG with tons of story sequences. Crash 4 has relatively little VA by comparison, and also uses intentionally low detail textures.
Regarding languages, I feel a better approach (if they don't do this already) would be to let the player decide what languages they want to download in order to avoid file size bloat.
There's no "magic" to Nintendo's approach per se, but there is a lot to be said for optimization, compression, and picking one's battles rather than letting game size balloon out of control.
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