It's hard and it particularly slows down the asset production process which is already a disproportionately slow and expensive part of development. Way easier to let the artists go apeshit exporting everything at 8k and a billion polygons because storage is cheap in a production environment.

Compression could help in theory, but then you'd have to decompress assets on the fly which takes a significant amount of processing power. The industry is trying to reduce the latency of getting assets into memory, compression would be moving the other way from that.

If you're conspiratorially minded then you might also conclude that it's to prevent people from having another major live service game installed on base model consoles, making you more likely to keep playing the one you've already installed. A kind of walled garden effect.

[–] Daxtron2@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I mean I get that decompression can be expensive, but there's nothing stopping them from having a base version of the game with smaller lower quality assets and allowing players that want to download the huge assets do so with a free dlc. Many games have done this in the past.

[–] SeekPie@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or like in mobile games (WoTB, PUBG) you have the option to download "HD-textures".

[–] Daxtron2@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah that's what I was trying to say, couldn't think of a specific example of the top of my head tho lol

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Woah. That was a fine idea, but a free DLC? Management isn't going to like that concept.

[–] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Nothing except the work of creating lower quality assets and splitting off the HD stuff into a separate download. Totally doable and I'd love to see it, but I doubt studios will commit the man hours unless they can be convinced that it will really make the game sell better.

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