I feel like “optimization” gets thrown around as a buzz word when talking about supposed unnecessarily large game sizes, like the upcoming Mortal Kombat. But what does it actually mean for a game to be optimized? Or how can it be done?
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A big obvious one is the question of whether you save a bunch of unique things or save the elements needed to make them and assemble them on the fly.
Consider a huge cookbook with thousands of recipes for cake in it. Most of the cakes are fundamentally the same ingredients (flour, sugar, egg, butter) with a few specialty ingredients that might also get re-used across recipes (chocolate, lemon, etc.)
One way to represent this cookbook in a computer is a set of ingredients (of which the computer can make as many copies as it wants) and recipes. Another way to represent it is with an example of each of the possible cakes you could bake. The first example is optimized for memory – recipes and ingredients take up less space than thousands of finished products. The second example is optimized for performance – whatever cake you might want is always available without having to assemble it.
Games face a similar tradeoff and have currently been favoring the second strategy. Just save gigabytes of unique assets and call them up as you need them. Memory is (relatively) cheap and extensible, but consumers demand top-of-the-line performance. In contrast, older games famously had to pack a lot into a small space, leading to famous hacks like the fact that the clouds and bushes in Super Mario Bros. are just the same blob painted different colors.
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