I understand that the game is on par with Gen 7 hardware but even some of those games like GTA 5 sported 60+ files sizes. Not to mention current games with 150+ sizes.
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The three biggest things in a game are audio, textures and video (like cinematics). Most cinematic scenes in ToTK are not pre-rendered, which are usually higher resolution. There is some audio, but we’re not talking something like Baldur’s Gate 3 which has hundreds of thousands of unique voice lines, for varying quest states, from every character in your party, etc. And as has already been mentioned here, the art style of BoTW / ToTK let them use relatively lower-resolution textures that don’t up a ton of space. You fight similar enemies throughout the game, and so on.
Basically, it doesn’t really have a lot of the things that add the most file size to a game by far.
A lot of a game’s data is simply models. Games like Tears of the Kingdom cheat by reusing models a LOT. No matter how much a model is used, it only needs to have one file in storage. So the more a single model is used and the fewer total models there are, it can greatly cut down the total file size.
They need to do this because Switch cartridges do have a maximum size. If the game is bigger than the cartridge, you’ll either need another cartridge or you’ll need to download the rest of the game. Nintendo is big on letting people play the game without ever connecting to the internet, so they try to avoid oversized games altogether.
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I knew this day would come. Way back when, Insert disc B to get another 360kb to continue the game was the norm . And we loved it .
Literally millions (probably more) of times of data required now to play games.
Sure, graphics are cool, but is content of the games better?
Tears of the Kingdom made a deliberate choice to use a very simple art style.
The cartoony art style means textures are mostly solid colors, and therefore can be incredibly low resolution. The environment can also be more smooth since it doesn’t need thousands of tiny rocks scattered about. There’s relatively few enemies, and when they “evolve,” it’s mostly just a texture swap. The game has 3 areas, but only one “real,” area, with the sky being mostly empty space and the abyss is very low detail with a lot of repeating assets, it just makes creative use of darkness to hide it.
Most of a game’s size is textures and models, so low-res textures and models combined with a lot of re-use and some procedural content such as roads/decals and you can make a game really small.
GTAV on the other hand probably blows TOTK’s file size on unique building models alone. Add on top of that a very detailed terrain map with high frequency detail (high frequency detail needs a high resolution image to store it), tons of models with detailed textures, more advanced side quests, custom audio dialog for every single side quest, etc. and it starts to become really clear how it can be 100gb+.
Interesting reading might be that the Devs for crash bandicoot effectively hacked the PS1 to get more memory space
> I understand that the game is on par with Gen 7
It’s *not*. Graphically it is very far below gen 7. They use smart tricks like their low-textured art style to avoid having high polygon assets. But they do such a good job with the art style that you don’t notice that it’s not ultra ultra HD with photo-realistic light scattering and whatnot.
> Not to mention current games with 150+ sizes.
Nintendo is VERY good at optimizing games. Meaning they take the time to modify and refine their code so that it is as little processor-intensive as possible. ELI5 for optimizing code can be a separate discussion. But the long and short of it is that Nintendo:
* Will delay as long as necessary to ensure the game is optimized and running at its max potential. No other developers are willing to do that.
* Keeps all of the development for games like that in-house which makes optimizing it much easier.
* Only needs the game to work on one system with one OS.
Also TOTK is basically BOTW with the largest DLC ever made. So on day 1 of TOTK development, they already had 50% of the game completed.
[mechanic](https://www.polygon.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-guide/23732914/blood-moon-length-cooking) talked about. The Blood Moon mechanic is a reset for the memory. The article obviously gives a better explanation.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Reduce – all cinematics are in-engine, so no video files were needed.
Reuse – the textures In-game are *constantly* reused all over the place, often in ways that you don’t notice until you do.
Recycle – At least from what I’ve seen, many textures were pulled from Breath of the Wild, and were already optimized for the platform. They likely tried any further optimizations on the models/textures they already had and further reduced their size for Tears.
Tears may be a large game, but it’s not trying to be as detailed and graphically intensive as, say, BG3, which is where a *lot* of games get bulked up from.
You can even see this for yourself if you have a decently-sized game library – Look at the download size of games in the same genre/scope and compare graphical fidelity between them. You’ll see a pattern real quick.
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