I have NWN and the expansions, and it's about a bazillion disks. Does it really fit in just 2.1GB?

Feat of modern compression and if game allowed less than full installation so some of the game files would be loaded from disk as needed instead of your hd, then usually those files were not compressed at all (this is why all infinity engine games are so small on GOG as pretty much everything was uncompressed as they had option for 'minimal' installation). Hard drive space used to be premium back in the day you know unlike nowadays when you can easily have several terabytes of hard drive space.

If you had CD versions, that's why. CDs are only able to store on average of 600-700 MB, and compression these days is better as well.

I just inserted my old Neverwinter Nights Diamond DVD, and it totals 2.55GB, so it's entirely possible that they could improve on that given the number of years which have passed.

It's a Dungeons and DRagons game, so *obviously* this was accomplished through some kind of Arcane and Dark Magics only accessible to Polish Wizards, level 20 or above.

Maybe Monk/Wizard dual-class? ;)

Some are monks. The Wizards choose to hide themselves away in the floating towers above the Polish swamps.

Swamps full of lizard people, I am sure....

By the way, I also have the 4 CD version of Planescape: Torment, and that was cut to two CD's in a later release.

This is 3E, it's multiclass ;)

For the curious, the NWN Platinum DVD uses zip archives, which are compressed with the dated DEFLATE algorithm (zip is basically a container format, not the compression algorithm itself).

GoG's Inno Setup installers are probably using the much newer LZMA/LZMA2 for compression.

This site attempts to provide comprehensive benchmarks of compression formats.

Multi-CD games (especially ones that don't fully install to the HDD) would have the same content on several discs to minimize disc-swapping. In addition, if you're running the game from disc, you can't have part of (for example) a music track at the end of one CD that spills over to the next, so it's not always possible to totally fill the disc.

My old install location totaled about 25GB because of all the mods I had downloaded : )

Somewhat unrelated I suppose.

So does each download come with a set of CD keys? The important part for playing online?

You just need one cd Key for the entire installation.

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