I think many recent COD's, ARK with all DLC's, RDR2, FF15 with all DLC's & HD Texture Pack have all of these beat.

Normally, any game in this size range is more about numbing the brain with pretty colors than actual content. Such as strange and mysterious things like, a plot, a thing called character development. Other oddities we rarely see, logic, realism(cause and effect).

Is the size always indicative of a bad game? No, but usually when 90% of a budget goes to graphics.....its meant as a pretty distraction.

Plus. How much effort is in anything besides graphics?

PS- these are rhetorical questions, try not to 404 your brain to much ;)

I feel like this topic is going almost nowhere because i just do not see the point.

Good graphics can enhance the experience as it gets more immersive. There is no link to "bad gameplay", "weak story" or whatelse... but most likely good graphics can not be done using very few space or a small studio (a lot of people need to work on the graphics); this is the only real link we may have.

Indeed, good graphics is a demanding thing for a studio, so we usually are experiencing it on "franchise-games". Yet you still have to consider the art, which is not bound to the graphic size and it can be considered even the most important factor. If you tune up your details, a lot of stuff can go wrong as this is demanding on the representation of the art. You simply will increase the stuff that can go wrong, yet, you also increase the stuff that can go good.

However, no matter how much demand it may be on the dev side... there is no reason why the effort on the gameplay or story is reduced... as this is even done with completly different persons inside a certain studio.

I will tell you why. Let's suppose you come up with a new gameplay mechanic. Well too bad, animating everything to make that mechanic look as seamless as everything else is too much work for the art department so nevermind, let's not have that mechanic.

Let's suppose the writer or someone realizes there's a plot hole and in hind sight one of the big scenes doesn't make a lot of sense. They'd like to rewrite that part completely, but too bad, the art department has already spent hundreds of man hours making the scene, decorating it, recording voices and animating all the characters, doing the camera work.. no way the suits will allow you to gut that work and start over.

Work takes time, effort, and money, even if it's done by a completely different department. Nevermind that communication and synchronization across departments tends to be slow and requires lots of meetings & wasted time. Adding new ideas or going back and changing things is always expensive if one part of the process is expensive. Long feedback loops are not very conductive to creativity and the kind of free experimentation you need for ideas to flourish.

Of those i only have FF15, but not installed atm. I just checked the game out and now it has me wondering. For the game its self it is almost 90 GB what they ask, the 4x package is rated at 155 GB. Do you happen to know if this 155 is on top of the game or bundled together?
You know, and i even won't hold it against you. Such is life. I guess it would be a much worse case if it was your own topic. As OP, i can assure you that up until now, i am quite satisfied with both replies and content

I guess you mean 'real' 970 GB, before the conversion :D

When converting the value to GiB, additional ~9% have to be substracted.

JFI (I guess you know the rate, but others might not)
1GB disk space = 0.93GiB (unformatted)
1TB disk space = 0.91TiB (unformatted)

Cluster size still matters when it comes to a large number of files. Having them too small means more space for the file system. Having them too large means losing storage space for small files.

DoubleSpace and similar tools I used back in the days, but they tended to be very unreliable. Once file specific compression became a thing, they lost their importance anyway. DoubleSpace would have no benefit for a zip file or PNG for example.

Actually, there's plenty of links. Many studios treat Gameplay, Graphics, and Story as a balancing triangle, a la the order settings in SimAnt.

But let's take a look at the yearly voetbal franchise that people care about in spite of it having brought about approximately 0% innovations to the table since 1983. Even in turning to 3D has the basic idea not changed. There is no story, because it's fucking voetbal. You can't change the gameplay because then you'd scare away the filthy casuals, the tryhard grognards, and the whales for making sweeping changes to a boring sport about going onto a pitch and kicking a ball.

So that leaves graphics. But why invest the billions of dollars in yearly gross in making a gross looking man sweat in hyper realistic ways? The camera is likely to be oriented at some nearly top down view, following a spinning blur.

This is but one case I can name a profit motive cutting into actual development incentives; see also Pokemon since they left the DS.

I would also have to reinstall that (FF15 and Ardyn DLC) too. Never had the HD pack installed, but heard it's way over 100GB.

EDIT - I think Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Collection was altogether over 100GB+ also. Halo MCC is huge too, IIRC.

yea, you are right. 109,99 GB for the ME collection but, it is 3 games of course. In perspective 44,38 for DA-I (how did i get in possession of all those DLC???) and ME-A 52,6 GB. I'm sure their coming titles would probably fall into the range too.

While i was it checked the Battlefields i have to and V goes for 90,52 GB so i'm sure the ;latest will probably fall into the 120 range too.

That latest Halo title is presumable also a big boy....

Here's also a thing to ponder..... Those remasters why do they stay so small. I believe Crysis just hits it at 20 GB and Halo MC is at 15 GB??? It probably has a lot to do with level design and such, gathering from the other comments but you would think 4k thingies would add up for a lot more.

There's the polygon count of course which would affect the level design you mentioned.

But I think what makes a huge difference is multitexturing. Modern games use multiple textures and logics for transparency, dirt and similar things where old games only have a few layers. Unless the devs don't add additional layers and also don't increase the texture size by a large factor, the data size won't change that much.

Maybe. But I also believe bloating a game with 20 sound packs is not only a equally bad idea, but a waste of money in terms of the supplier. I think the logic is still reasonable though. Bloat in one form or another, not having much to offer in terms of quality.

I do remember watching video's about the upcoming unreal 5 engine. That was indeed pretty layered stuff they were showing.
This maybe completely unrelated all together but... when you check out the file size for the Remnant 2, i believe one of the first games released with that engine, you'll see that it is actually a good bit away from 100 GB. At 80 GB namely. (sizes taken from the game requirements as provided by the developer)

And that crazy thing EA is working on, Immortals of Aveum. Another UE5 engine game with a minimum gpu requirement of a 2080Super (3080Ti recommended!!!! @dizzy) will only consume 110GB.

My biggest installers:

Middle-earth: Shadow of War ~ 115 GB

Horizon Zero Dawn ~ 75 GB

And I played GTA 5 once. It was bigger than 100 GB.