Well, we have to account for the fact that modern system simply don't require that much optimization and compression. Working with stricter limits meant that dev teams had to get creative and minimize file size, while nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB.
HeckFeck|1 year ago
Irrespective of the abundance of storage we now enjoy, and even though I could rationally understand the reasons, this will always make me raise an eyebrow or sigh.
fennecfoxy|1 year ago
The amount of technology and number and size of assets in a game now is just insane, it is in no way at all comparable to the garage projects for 8bit consoles.
Remember, games used to have to be ported - they were so locked into their particular platform/hardware that porting a game was essentially a total rewrite every single time. Nowadays we can write once, run on every single platform with just hooks into platform specific libs swapped out.
Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware. But then modern games would be impossible to actually get finished.
eru|1 year ago