How do developers do this? Does it just mean the first few levels have been downloaded? What about open world style games? How do they know which bits you will/won’t interact with and what happens if you get to a part that isn’t yet downloaded?
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The most common method is to pull out high resolution textures. One really nice thing with this method is that you can actually stack levels of the textures, so you end up just downloading the 4k textures during a later pass, while the 2k textures that were initially downloaded are still used as mipmaps* for objects farther away from the camera.
For some games, audio can also be a huge chunk of the data, and also can be initially provided with a lower quality. Games with lots of voiced lines, especially if they come from customizable characters, tend to have *tons* of audio, and audio has a lot of compression settings options. Unlike textures, you generally end up fully replacing the lower quality data, meaning using this options means increasing the *total* download size of the game.
Some games also still use prerendered videos, though this is much less common now than it used to be. With video, you can both decrease the resolution and increase the compression options, allowing for a massive trade of quality to size.
All three of the above options has the same basic effect: the quality of the game will be lower until the higher resolution content is downloaded. The effect will be very similar to going into the settings and turning down some of the graphics settings.
Occasionally, games will use a method of locking you out of some content. With an RPG, for example, they might download the tutorial level initially, and delay the final level until later. If this option is used, you’ll likely hit an invisible wall, loading screen, or other barrier to prevent you from entering areas you have not yet downloaded. This tends to be a lot harder to implement than the above options, and is basically the same idea as having a DLC or patch that adds new content to the game.
Some types of the content, such as audio or video, may also be optional. You probably wouldn’t notice that your character only says 3 different idle lines instead of 5. Perhaps TVs in the game will be blank until the movies that play on them are downloaded.
Each of the options can also be combined in various ways, depending on the decisions of the developer and nature of the game.
* Games generally use mipmaps of textures for objects farther away for performance. This is the idea of using a lower resolution texture as the object gets farther away. There is no reason to bother trying to render some gigantic texture on an object that takes up just a couple pixels. For many types of textures, such as checkerboards, this can also actually improve the render quality when the object is small on screen as well. At the same time, if you zoom in to an object and have it taking up a lot of your screen, you likely want to use a very high resolution texture so it looks nice.
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