The 10 Biggest PC Games of All Time

[Alex]

Personally I'm glad I don't have to juggle around a dozen or so floppy disks anymore for each game.

Would go back to them in a jiff if it meant we would get a game industry like the one in the 80s or the 90s.

 

[Azalin]

4 discs of Torment knocked me down with a hammer. I mean, just the year before I installed and play Fallout 2 at normal installation size, 300M, quite a lot.

Torment didn't support a full install normally,there was a way to do a "full install" by copying the contents of the CDs to your HDD and then changing some ini files to trick the game into thinking it was loading from the CD instead of the HDD.I discovered that after my first playthrough in which I had to change CDs every time I went from one are of the city to another

BG2 on the other hand had a full install option requiring 2GB,pretty huge when my HDD was 20GB back then

 

[Xor]

I remember seeing a 10 gig hard drive in a magazine years ago and wondering how anyone could ever use that much space.

 

[DraQ]

And let's not forget the patch that you needed in order to finally reach a playable level, but that one weighted a huge 30 Mb or so, which was hellish to get on dial-up at a time when a big patch was expected to be around 5 Mb. Good times. Good times.

The patch? You wish, I didn't even have the tube back then.

I do remember it taking forever to load - even by the standards of someone who grew up on C64 and "datasettes".

Neat game, though.

 

[Konjad]

They left DA:O's Ultimate Edition out of that list out of stupidity.

While the main game folder takes about ~13GB, the DLCs combined take up to 12GB of data, but it's on a different folder.

They just have so much content

 

[sgc_meltdown]

when storage media (CDs) was actually larger than most hard drives

when I got syndicate wars the full install size was way larger than my harddrive (312 megs empty I think)

what the hell is with these fucking things that are all bigger than my harddrive but I can change them in and out

fuck yes 2X speed sound blaster cd drive speed of light

when I next upgraded to a 3.2 gig quantum fireball I felt like a data olympian

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I remember seeing a 10 gig hard drive in a magazine years ago and wondering how anyone could ever use that much space.

I've had this kind of moment at least three times, every 5 years or so. 25 GB installs still kind of blow me away to be perfectly honest. I mean, I get that an MMO with a huge world and tons of assets can need a lot of space. But 35 GB Max Payne 3 is just stupid.

As an aside, my installation of CK2 weighs a little over 1GB. Fuck yeah Paradox.

 

[Ashery]

On Topic: Age of Conan looks interesting. Does it suck or not?

Utter shit at release. Barely kept me playing for two weeks (Yea, I didn't even use my full free month), but I was losing interest pretty quickly in MMOs in general at the time, so take that with a grain of salt. I also got sucked into WoW around the time of Burning Crusade was released, and that only kept me interested for 3.5 months to put those two weeks into perspective.

 

[Quetzacoatl]

On Topic: Age of Conan looks interesting. Does it suck or not?

Utter shit at release. Barely kept me playing for two weeks (Yea, I didn't even use my full free month), but I was losing interest pretty quickly in MMOs in general at the time, so take that with a grain of salt. I also got sucked into WoW around the time of Burning Crusade was released, and that only kept me interested for 3.5 months to put those two weeks into perspective.

Shame, there hasn't been a good MMO since early Ultima:Online. I thank you for saving me time and money.

 

[Ashery]

On Topic: Age of Conan looks interesting. Does it suck or not?

Utter shit at release. Barely kept me playing for two weeks (Yea, I didn't even use my full free month), but I was losing interest pretty quickly in MMOs in general at the time, so take that with a grain of salt. I also got sucked into WoW around the time of Burning Crusade was released, and that only kept me interested for 3.5 months to put those two weeks into perspective.

Shame, there hasn't been a good MMO since early Ultima:Online. I thank you for saving me time and money.

DAoC was absolutely fucking amazing pre-ToA expansion. It didn't enable the same type of dickish behavior that early UO was known (and loved, by some) for, but the game wasn't all about grinding for gear. The difference in gear between those that played obsessively and the more casual group was actually fairly small thanks to the crafting system, which is *vital* if the end game is world PvP.

Also, I should emphasize that I said *at launch*. The game was rushed out early because the developer was strapped for cash, so it probably has improved significantly since I played (And if it hasn't, it should've been shut down years ago).

 

[CrazyLoon]

I remember when I first got Doom, it came as 4 or 5 floppy disks, I'm not exactly sure. The game back then seemed astronomically large.

 

[DwarvenFood]

I love the "small" games that used to come as a single .exe file with a single data file. Still don't know how Carrier Command managed to do it:

carrier.exe     135KB
carrier.dat     53KB

 

[DraQ]

Frontier came on single floppy with gameworld consisting of entire galaxy of fairly astronomically correct star systems, including our own.

 

[asper]

I love the "small" games that used to come as a single .exe file with a single data file. Still don't know how Carrier Command managed to do it:

carrier.exe    135KB
carrier.dat    53KB

And just to think what that game included. The command of different vehicles (four amphibians, four planes) directly (like in a simulation) or by programming them (AI implemented) - you could watch the view from all vehicles at once in split-screen mode - localized damage on the vehicles and the carrier, drones that protect the carrier with positions you could select, different weapons, the building of structures on islands (like anti aircraft guns that shot enemy planes flying over, landing strips your planes could land on, drilling towers for mining oil), a map with dozens of islands, and a second carrier with the same things that is doing the same stuff you are doing (colonizing islands and building structures on them). All in real-time 3D. When you sent a manta on an island with a 'colonizing bomb', you would see the island's structures slowly being built up. I am probably even forgetting about a ton of stuff.

Not to mention the 'conceptual' actievement of practically creating a whole new genre (first-person RTS). Or was Midwinter first?

135 KB !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_BlO1CJn34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ7QjebH-M4

Frontier is of course even more mind-blowing. Those guys could program.

 

[DraQ]

I love the "small" games that used to come as a single .exe file with a single data file. Still don't know how Carrier Command managed to do it:

carrier.exe    135KB
carrier.dat    53KB

And just to think what that game included. The command of different vehicles (four amphibians, four planes) directly (like in a simulation) or by programming them (AI implemented) - you could watch the view from all vehicles at once in split-screen mode - localized damage on the vehicles and the carrier, drones that protect the carrier with positions you could select, different weapons, the building of structures on islands (like anti aircraft guns that shot enemy planes flying over, landing strips your planes could land on, drilling towers for mining oil), a map with dozens of islands, and a second carrier with the same things that is doing the same stuff you are doing (colonizing islands and building structures on them). All in real-time 3D. When you sent a manta on an island with a 'colonizing bomb', you would see the island's structures slowly being built up. I am probably even forgetting about a ton of stuff.

Not to mention the 'conceptual' actievement of practically creating a whole new genre (first-person RTS). Or was Midwinter first?

135 KB !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_BlO1CJn34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ7QjebH-M4

Looks pretty damn awesome.

Frontier is of course even more mind-blowing. Those guys could program.

That guy. Singular. Frontier was originally coded in Amiga's assembler by Braben alone. Whole quarter of million lines of code. Then it was ported to PC by Sawyer.

Roughly 500M dynamic, full scale star systems (most procedural, some hand coded), 3D engine with no drawing distance limitation, curvilinear polys, highly detailed objects and environments, coloured, sourced static lighting with flat shading, ran on 286, Amiga and Atari ST.

 

[Ulminati]

You know -- I'm actually OK with X-plane taking up 70 gigs if it's to cram in hi-detail terrain of the entire goddamn earth.

 

[poocolator]

How does Max Payne 3 take up 35GB when it's a fucking rail-shooter? It must be all of those lines of dialogue dripping with intrigue and creamy pith.

 

[CorpseZeb]

That guy. Singular. Frontier was originally coded in Amiga's assembler by Braben alone. Whole quarter of million lines of code. Then it was ported to PC by Sawyer. Roughly 500M dynamic, full scale star systems (most procedural, some hand coded), 3D engine with no drawing distance limitation, curvilinear polys, highly detailed objects and environments, coloured, sourced static lighting with flat shading, ran on 286, Amiga and Atari ST.

... but... but... was a 32KiB Elite on the BBC model B much, much more impressive? Given the machine and memory restriction, yet detail of galaxy systems was very similar to the Fronter had (except on-the-planet surface thingy, and solid 3D graphic sub-system of course).

Ps. If someone can mix those Galaxies full of star systems with the... let's say... planets from "The precursors" (or just some plain-Jane procedural generated planets, even Oblivion level detail will be fine) into one coherent game... well... I can die peacefully at least.

 

[ohWOW]

Looking at Frontier and then at our modern gaming "gen" just helps me realise how low we've fallen.


I would throw hundreds of dosh at Frontier full refresh with Freelancer graphics, for example.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I remember that I got into emulation partly because FREE GAEMZ and partly because I couldn't install more than two or three games on my itty bitty 1998 hd.

 

[Metro]

Didn't Carmack once claim early in Rage's development that it was terabytes big or some such nonsense?

 

[DwarvenFood]

You know the size of today's games is mostly textures, and that is not all that impressive, it's like comparing megapixels on photo cameras. Rage could have been terabytes as source code / uncompressed textures ?

 

[Metro]

Yeah, now that you mention it I believe that was the case.

 

[DraQ]

... but... but... was a 32KiB Elite on the BBC model B much, much more impressive? Given the machine and memory restriction, yet detail of galaxy systems was very similar to the Fronter had (except on-the-planet surface thingy, and solid 3D graphic sub-system of course).

Planet, sun and station, without proper physics, frames of reference, nor scale?

Nah.

Frontier required some really creative programming merely to go around lack of FPU when handling its range of distances alone.

You know the size of today's games is mostly textures, and that is not all that impressive, it's like comparing megapixels on photo cameras. Rage could have been terabytes as source code / uncompressed textures ?

Megatextures. The best innovashun ever.