I know it makes me sound like an of man shouting at clouds but the other day I installed Morrowind and was genuinely blown away by how smooth and reliable it ran and all the content in the game fitting in 2gb of space. Skyrim requires I delete my other games to make room and still requires a whole second game worth of mods to match the stability and quantity of morrowind.
High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal's new "Nanite" tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.
I know it makes me sound like an of man shouting at clouds but the other day I installed Morrowind and was genuinely blown away by how smooth and reliable it ran and all the content in the game fitting in 2gb of space. Skyrim requires I delete my other games to make room and still requires a whole second game worth of mods to match the stability and quantity of morrowind.
Back in the day morrowind was unoptimised too, https://kotaku.com/morrowind-completely-rebooted-your-xbox-during-some-loa-1845158550
That's fair, though honestly the only issue I ever had on the Xbox was having a loading screen every 5 minutes.
High res textures (especially normal maps) and higher quality/coverage audio really made game sizes take off. Unreal's new "Nanite" tech, where models can have literally billions of polygons, actually reduces game size because no normal maps.