Last week, we reported on the “news” that The Last of Us: Part 2 could be over 100 GB, a throwaway piece I’ll admit. However, it does bring up a good point, as we hunker down to stave off boredom during lockdowns, we’re also met with a slight restriction on internet bandwidth. With more of us home either overall or in our households, we’re using up as much internet as we can handle. Of course, it’s not a finite resource such as oil, though I’m sure if it were we’d still be going through it watching all those videos of your dad with the pickle jar. In short, downloads are a bit slower now.

This, to an extent, can be a problem for some. It is not uncommon in America to find people still without unlimited access. Though that’s another story of ISPs carving up the country like it was the territory days of wrestling, I should tell it to you one day. No, some of us still have serious data caps, while others luckily don’t and have as many options on the table as possible. There’s a problem with options; there are too many of the things, and when you’re as indecisive as I am, you’ll find yourself there for hours deciding before you put another episode of Doctor Who or The Orville on.

To get to my point, games are too big, all the way up to stupid levels of ridiculous. I’ll stick my hands up and say I’m not on the best internet plan ever, but I’m also not on the worst, I can cope. Though when you’re in lockdown with more than one person, you begin to realize there is a bigger problem than deciding who’s turn it is to climb out the bunker and fight an irradiated lizard with a German Shephard. Claybook might just be a couple of GB, Automachef might be two and a half of GB, and FTL might be a couple hundred MB, but when your dad’s videos start buffering, there will be an argument in a minute.

Yeah, your husband might just be watching a series about a gay man that looks after tigers, accuses a woman of murder, and has more fatal love stories than Siegfried & Roy; but he’ll be right in his mullet-based arms when you download Battle Chef Brigade again. Yeah, you thought this Netflix thing might get you some “chill” time. No, it’s probably causing more matrimonial tiffs than cheating, murder, conspiracy, fraud, and faking your own death does in Eastenders. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” I can assume it is quite cold around your house when you want to play an RTS and it’s 50 GB.

What’s the solution? Well, maybe if games weren’t 100+ GB downloads, that would be a start. The jump between the PS3 and PS4-era of games is astonishing when you look at it. Games in some cases grew six times larger. It sounds ridiculous to some, but Grand Theft Auto V on the PS3 was about 8 GB before online updates. A measly eight? The PS4 edition is 50+, soon enough it will be getting a bus pass and Zimmer frame. Save files can be in the GB range now, I remember when they were in KBs. I’m not that old, I’m talking less than 20-years ago.

Grand Theft Auto V couldn’t have been played in 4K at the time of its PS4 release, that’s not what caused this sudden jump. Even if it was, I can say unequivocally, that’s not worth that colossal jump. A lot of the time, it isn’t really on the disc. A majority of a game has to be downloaded for hours, even if you own that it is meant to be on. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, if I’m remembering correctly, was a single level just to get past certification. Why was this the case? It was a way to get the discs printed on time while the game is still worked on up to the release.

In some way, I’m arguing that physical media will prevent you from being a joke on a sad “documentary” where one man is thrust into cult appeal. In another way, I’m saying that developers have gotten out of hand in their effort to make everything as pretty and shiny as possible without focusing on the important things, like gameplay or something interesting. I understand that part of it is the size of games now compared to the year 4, when Mosses was a young lad, as well as the massive leap in resolution. Though why are we chasing resolutions on a console?

The Nintendo Switch is a plucky little machine that only does 720p in hand-held mode, a wonderful thing for the games it uses. If you’re playing a PS4 or Xbox One you’re probably playing on your couch a couple of feet from your very large TV, why do you need 4K? On PC, I could understand as you’re closer, you’ll want more detail, and with menus with intricate text displays, there is a reason for 4K. However, consoles, when used properly, don’t require intricate text reading, precise clicking, and anything that involves that of an RTS. I’ll repeat myself to be clear, why are we chasing resolutions with consoles?

The Xbox Series X is claimed to hit as high as 8K, but why? It is chasing useless numbers that mean nothing more than the press releases boasting “I’ve got a bigger number than you!” If you’re that inclined about making something bigger, my spam folder is filled with solutions; Along with the answer to Gonorrhea and some vouchers for the supermarket. Having a larger resolution doesn’t make the games better, if anything, making your game the most beautiful jungle of sci-fi nonsense, like Anthem, just makes it worse because it’s devoid of gameplay.

A higher (reasonable) frame-rate would benefit games more than smaller screen furniture, bigger skyboxes, and greyer games than ever before. Yes, you can fit more into the screen, but even God of War (2018) placed its camera right in Kratos’ hair crack. We’ve gotten closer and closer, hiding behind boxes shooting people, and it’s devolved into a point where almost every Triple-A game is visually the same as the one before it. Yet they get bigger and longer, and still haven’t asked me to get those emails.

The larger the game is the longer it is going to take to download, that much is clear. However, something else is a problem when you’re downloading: Sony, Microsoft, Twitch, Steam, and so on. It might be what the Mosses would have called a “Flex,” but there is a large disparity in downloads on two specific consoles and PCs. Yes, my Xbox One will often download right up to the download speed’s limit, it is wonderfully fast and I can’t think of any other way it should be. My PS4 does something horrid that should be taken out back with a Golden Retriever and the Lysol.

You may have noticed that when you download on the PS4, you’ve got something that has the stupid “ready to play” option, and there is a dip. It is rather a cliff that downloads fall off of in Sony’s effort to capitalize on their PlayStation Plus subscriptions. Until you are on this “ready to play” section, you are on a priority server that will download moderately well, then you hit the cliff and you’ve got lesbian robbers syndrome. This is ignoring that if the console is turned on and you’re playing something in the meanwhile, you can forget playing that new Man Shooter 2020 today.

If you put the PS4 onto its rest mode, you might have a better time of downloading, however, that’s hoping you’ve got something else you can and want to do. I didn’t notice this being as much of a problem with the PS3; though I could be forgetting some of that as I stuck mostly to physical media. Downloading on the Twitch app from all the Twitch Prime games, is a mess as well right now. What’s possibly worse about that experience is its lack of visualized information. It is a timer that could have been made by Microsoft with how unstable it is.

Epic and Steam are a mess of single downloads at a time, so if you’re the aforementioned indecisive type, you’ll get bored by the time Total War: Shogun 2 has downloaded. Pick it all apart and you’re left with games that are big and getting bigger, downloads that are currently being throttled slightly, and you’re now single but can’t “Netflix and chill” because you want to play Earthlock, Enter The Gungeon, and Devil May Cry HD tonight. If there is some way of making games smaller, even a bit, it should have been done by now.

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