Oblivion with all DLC ~6 gigs
Fallout 3 with all DLC ~9 gigs
Fallout New Vegas with all DLC ~9 gigs
Skyrim with all DLC ~9 gigs

Skyrim with Hi-res Textures ~13 gigs

From Oblivion to Skyrim, the game sizes didn't really grow. Getting some higher resolution textures on PC, Skyrim grew in size a little bit.

Now given that Fallout 4 is ~28-30 gigs at launch, and that's WITHOUT DLC, that's:
- three times the amount of data as Skyrim with DLC
- and twice the amout of data as Skyrim with hi-res textures

What can we expect for all those gigs of data?

- All that protagonist voice acting, that's gotta add a LOT of course
- Higher bitrate audio in sound and music?
- Higher resolution textures?
- More video clips?
- Higher bitarte video clips?

More of the Textures will be High Res.

The Meshes are on a different system than before so no one knows if these are as space efficient.

More lines of spoken dialogue but its been pointed out that file size wise this wouldn't be as significant as textures.

More Music?

World size could be larger?

In all honesty though the game should be bigger but its hard to tell without being inside or hassling someone that we should not be. I can tell you what on day one this will be answered likely withen the first 10 minutes of the game downloading onto a mod authors computer um like maybe mine

We don't have that much information about whats actually in there, but its a fair bet that its a combination of whatever fancy new assets we have with the new consoles alongside the 111k of dialogue lines and that whole line from Todd about it being "The biggest, craziest world we've ever done.".

I do hope its bigger than what we have before, but we'll just have to wait and see.

stuff

and things

in a 64bit executable

3 time the machine code

Haha awesome Yup I'll be digging into the files too, although I'm gonna have to wait a few days while my Pip-Boy edition is delivered since I wasn't able to get it from a local store.

Definitely hoping for quality improvements mainly in the area of textures and audio quality.

Forgot about the game having more music, definitely, although as with your point about dialogue, I think again that it won't have as much an impact as other factors.

@ Relight,

I hadn't thought about how being a 64 bit application would effect the size of the game but then again I'm not a programmer and there are not a lotta 64 bit games other than maybe Witcher3 that I could have a look at.

Getting eager to play the game again, dang I need to actually finish Skyrim >< but so many new mods and updates right now haha and I just got around to playing it again.

A modern game? Skyrim was way too light and its textures were terrible for its time until they delivered hi-res DLC. 30GB is a normal amount for 2015, considering multiplayer match games are like 50GB each without all the NPC audio or gigantic world.

roughly 240000000000 bits (or 60000000000 nibbles)

Hoping better textures,but seeing they are now using "Physical Base Rendering" those texture have to be unique so the files size are larger then regular texture from previous game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjGETJMZvY

What "different system" are you referring to?

They've said twice the amount of assets than Skyrim (at a higher resolution), and more voice acting than Skyrim and Fallout 3 combined - and evidently a much larger soundtrack, radio tunes and ambient alike.

To be fair, 30GB is still pretty small compared to other current gen games.

Your forgetting its a whole new console generation going from dual cores to 8 cores and 512mb of ram to 8 gigs, theres ganna be a lot higher res rextures and more assets in the game then ever before.

Um. No. Nobody is forgetting this.

@ Lady Selene

Meshes might be different but that also is just speculation from the mod community though I don't see why these wouldn't be different either due to the way stuff just changes over time. Simply put with the new lighting system and likely shadows the meshes also will be different. So people will have to figure out again how to port stuff specific for this game. Anyways these could be bigger files.

The biggest change for asset development will be Physical Based Rendering. But correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't that actually save on texture filesize? Instead of including the lighting data in several different maps that have to be generated for each texture, PBR lets you define material settings that you can set and reuse for any similar textures... I think. It also means more work at the start creating and defining material types, but a smoother workflow once you actually have those materials.

I'm 99.99% sure that all of those gigs are......Fallout 4.

I'm 0.01% sure that all of those gigs are......Morrowind HD Remastered

Oh I forgot but uh some of those Gigs could be the games you get to play on your Pipboy.

Yup your game has games in the game!

Bet there will be an achievement for the games in the game.

Might also have to find game cards for your PipBoy too.

Your pipboy games will also have.......MICRO TRANSACTIONS DUN DUN DUUUUN

Also don't forget all those script with the new in built settlement house deco mincraft game like.

Yup. Not forgetting. Simply noting that it is a big jump from previous games, and welcoming speculation on what's taking up all the space - in terms of added stuff (such as voiced protagonists) and in terms of what we hope might be most improved, such as textures. People have also been mentioning meshes, which is pretty important I think. In some cases, more mesh detail = more "realism" = greater filesize.


Yeah, that's why I didn't list sizes of other games for comparison. I love Bethesda's games, they have their own very distinct style, but let's face it, most of us I think would agree that Bethesda is often a little bit behind the curve in some areas - *cough* FACES *cough* - owing in no small part to their long development cycles, I'm sure, so... if they're a little bit behind in some areas of technology compared to other current games that probably have shorter development cycles, I'd expect them to be somewhat smaller in terms of filesize.

The actual engine will be a tiny part of that 30gb. Everything else is data. Even the scripts are not executable. They are interpreted by the engine, or rather the compiled version is.

Hopefully less load times and system freeze.

As I recall from other articles, a big part of the size of current-gen games is uncompressed audio. After that, is probably textures.

It's not really about longer development cycles as it is the nature of their workflow. It's all modular - instead of constructing huge models that represent entire game levels, like most games, they build tons of smaller kit pieces for architecture, furniture, and clutter that they can reuse to build several very different locations from a relatively small amount of assets. Same goes for faces - insteading of constructing unique models for each character like Dishonored or most other games, they build a robust facegen system they can use for every NPC in the game.

They also "systemize" things like AI or quests so that they can just use one system to cover everything they do easily, but that won't affect memory all too much.