Capitalist Innovation. Just more in shitification. Nothing but the lowest common denominator.

I highly doubt it was the code. They probably reduced texture and background fidelity and compressed the cutscenes heavily. It's simply impossible to reduce a codebase by 91% and have it still be recognizable. However, the N64 had better hardware and it's possible that some code could be eliminated because the chips had features that made them code not needed. But not nearly 686 MB worth.

Once gpu hardware becomes good enough that even low end computers can support real time ray tracing at usable speeds, game developers will be able to remove the lightmaps, ao maps, etc that usually comprise a very significant fraction of a game's total file size. The problem with lightmaps is that even re-used textures still need to use different lightmaps, and you also need an additional 3d grid of baked light probes to light dynamic objects in the scene.

Activision has a very interesting lighting technique that allows some fairly good fidelity from slightly lower resolution lightmaps (allowing normal maps and some degree of specular to work over a single lightmap texel) in combination with surface probes and volume probes, but it's still a fairly significant amount of space. It also requires nine different channels afaik instead of the three that a normal lightmap would have. (https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2024/content/Roughton/SIGGRAPH%20Advances%202024%20-%20Hemispheres%20Presentation%20Notes.pdf)

Don't blame the devs, blame the timelines and the pressures of implementing features.

COD is pretty much just a huge confusing user interface with a bit of a game attached to it, released yearly. They for some reason force all assets for their online game to be installed if you install any cod game. It's ridiculous.

I already know that people are going to excuse this practice or say it's progress but it's not excusable, space wasting is a big problem in modern game development. Especially since modern games do not use the same optimization, such as the fact that you do not need to store duplicate rotated or mirrored versions of textures. Since one idiot I've met on Lemmy doesn't understand what that means and thinks I'm talking about actual mirrors. Here's a short demonstration.

Here is an example of a texture tile from an RPGmaker game. It's a lower quality but this concept does scale up and really applies to any game where textures are stored images and not solid colors or AI generated on the fly (basically the vast majority of games out there).

This is an example of Mirroring or Reflection. Yeah that's right the word mirror can refer to a transformation I know wild but for people who are actual game devs you should know this already. Even though this texture is small if you have a lot like this which could easily be mirrored it can add up fast especially with larger textures.

This last one is called rotating, it's not always ideal since some textures are orientation sensitive and could handle being mirrored but get messed up in tiling if they get rotated. So it can't always be used but should be used in cases where it can be.

Both of those are very computationally cheap and simple ways to save space on textures by only having as many as you need to paint the scene.

Another way to optimize is to simply use lossless compression schemes, which these images are already doing since they are .png files. This might seem like a no-brainer but I've seen many modern games which store textures completely uncompressed and waste a lot of space, especially for bigger textures. It also applies to FMVs and animated textures too. Use lossless compression standards for your assets, I really shouldn't have to say that.

Finally one way to reduce size dramatically is to just omit assets that aren't needed. If your machine isn't 4K capable or doesn't have a 4K display than 4K or higher graphics aren't going to do you any good and are going to be a waste of space. Most games don't let you omit them during the download process but worse, some games complain or redownload them if you delete them, despite them not being used at all. Basically these games could fit in a smaller size but they just don't because they have duplicate unused assets that could be removed but either make it difficult or don't let you at all.

I get a paragraph for anything politically complex. At best. Why are the replies here 2000 word essays?

It’s funny because you don’t even have to go that far to find examples of really poor space usage.

Final Fantasy VII has the entire game on each disc. Only the cutscenes are different between each disc, that’s why the natural breakpoint for the game after the party splits up was shifted, because the ending video was too big and required a disc by itself.

The second a developer doesn’t have to worry about something, they don’t. Give them 2TB NVMe, 5090, i9-14900k and 32GB of RAM, and suddenly that will all be at max utilization. But this isn’t a modern thing, it’s just one of many “necessity is the mother of invention” examples.

Another great example: Every modern desktop app and most mobile apps that just package & run an entire web browser for every single app. There is zero benefit to the user experience or resource utilization to use these sorts of tools, the only reason to do so is to allow code reuse & simplify development.

some games did the opposite, when they ported to platforms with better hardware they would have improved graphics, longer intros, better sounds, maybe even extra levels. my favorite game of the time (still one of my favorites today) Prince of Persia is an example.

original apple II version:

popular dos version:

macintosh version:

SNES version:

Also by making the videos blurry https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BaX5YUZ5FLk

Videos and textures are usually the biggest part of games, closely followed by audio

Game Dev here.I WISH we could still ship with N64 quality textures and audio. We'd use so much less disc space and probably finish sooner and cleaner.