Can anyone clue me in as to why games have to be so massive now?

Some of the greatest games ever made came on a single floppy disc. They were engaging with story lines that kept you coming back for more. In fact, one of the best games of all time was Nethack. Each time you played it, it was always different. Never the same. And it was small! Compiled it fit on a floppy.

Right now, I’m sitting here as SecondLife has just finished downloading a 20+ meg update. On average, WoW’s updates are around 50meg or so. Guild Wars is hard to figure because it updates constantly in the background while you’re playing. There is no weekly or monthly updates as such. Still, the size of the updates must be significant given the amount of new content always showing up.

But its not just the online games. Half-Life 2 was a significant part of a DVD to install. Quake 4 the same. The Movies is another. F.E.A.R. The Sims 2. All big games. In fact, any game with more than 2 CDs [sh|c]ould be added to this list in my opinion.

Worse yet, we sacrifice story and uniqueness for the latest graphics or the best physics or some other whiz-bang feature that doesn’t really make the game better or more significant. Its usually just an attempt to try and make the game more realistic or pretty or eye-candy-appealing.

I miss games like Eye of the Beholder. Sure, it was several floppy discs large, but the emphasis of the game was the story line itself. Nethack is completely random and entirely text based, yet it is as addictive today as it was when I first discovered it.

Sure, there are still some games around like that. The Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale series had fantastic story lines. Elder Scrolls is another. But Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very big and by all accounts, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is going to be so big that for a while, people didn’t believe it’d be possible to get it on one disc for the XBox 360.

Just as an aside, I really dislike RPGs on a console. A gamepad or controller just doesn’t do it for me. Not enough control. It might work for FPS where you can just cycle through weapons and so on, but too many things to take care of in an RPG. Without a keyboard that becomes significantly difficult, to the point of hurting the game. Anyway… ;-)

The problem is, now that we’ve had a taste of all this realism and eye candy, are people able, or even willing, to sacrifice it if it meant smaller and better story driven games? Would you be willing to play a game that was on a single CD and still looked kinda like Quake 3 Arena, if the story was so significantly more fantastic than it might have been otherwise. Would you justify companies spending money on story instead of technology by buying the games?

Everyone constantly seems to say the same thing often. They want better story lines. They want to be drawn in to the game, not just watching it through the monitor. But to achieve that means sacrificing the latest and greatest. I know I’d be extremely happy to make that sacrifice as long as the companies made the genuine effort on the story. I never finished playing Doom 3 because the story sucked and it was boring. I don’t want to repeat that mistake again. I would’ve gladly given up the flash lighting in Doom 3 if the story was better.

So as I sit here watching SecondLife install its latest updates, I beg of the developers and publishers… I’d rather have a great story and poor graphics than awesome graphics and a boring story line. Please.

The by-product of this would mean smaller games too. ;-) Which is what I really would love to see. I’ve gone from buying floppies to single CDs because I got sick of shuffling floppies. I now buy DVD versions of games whenever possible, regardless of the extra cost, because I’ve gotten sick of shuffling CDs. In the near future, the same will happen with DVDs I suspect. Then I guess it will be HD-DVD or BluRay time. Who knows. But what I really hate is shuffling discs to install. Or waiting for lengthy downloads/updates. I don’t want to wait for that. Its not productive or relaxing at all.

But I’d definitely give up flash features in exchange for story. And enjoy the reduced size (and less disc shuffling) that results from such a move. ;-)