No mans sky is like 18GB or so on my PS4, yet there are 256 galaxies and literally around 18 quintillion planets. It can be played completely offline too, so it isnt coming from some server somewhere
I understand they’re procedurally generated, so they dont even exist until you pass through that area, but even after playing for countless hours and crossing thousands of miles of landmass, the save file is still extremely small
In: 1323
The vast majority of storage requirements for modern games is in art assets and sound files. Code is just text and even millions of lines of code is only a few megabytes.
Each separate art asset requires its own files. But additional uses of the same asset do not increase size. For example, say your game needs fruit. You model and create art for a banana asset. Now it doesn’t matter if you include 1 banana or 200,000,000 bananas in the game, they will all look to the file of the banana asset on how to build it. But if you instead of 100s of different fruits, you now have to model and have art for each of those hundreds of fruits. Now expand on that for every different unique asset in a modern AAA game like Balders Gate with so many different environments, objects, weapons, character classes, appearances, and armor.
Same with sound, if your game can get away with just a few sound effects to draw on for every scenario, you don’t need much space. But if you require many unique sound effects, dialog options music cues, size increases rapidly.
Procedural generation can be tiny if they use a smaller pool of assets and rely more on code to mix-and-match those assets into unique environments.
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