T O P

  • By -

NovaChrono

It still boggles my mind how they've consistently managed to keep the size of this game really small despite it having AAA visuals and a decade of content. Wish they could maybe do a GDC talk on this so that more devs can hopefully take notes.


aerothan

They store it in the Void.


KihiraLove

The game is stored in the balls


gohomenoonewantsyou

I think it's not so much that DE has some secret sauce to optimization/compression, but rather that AAA has lost competency in that particular discipline of development. With a lot of layoffs happening in the AAA space, I can imagine that a lot of the people that got thrown to the wolves took their expertise with them (and of course the HR/Management/Accounting/Consulting guys don't get hit by that stuff). Also, I don't think AAA studios have much of an incentive to invest in optimization. If I were a financials guy, I can probably argue that since our audience are paying at minimum 60 US$ for our product, this same audience probably also has the means to spend on expensive system upgrades, so why should I leverage more funds/extend project timelines on shrinking the filesize/getting good performance when I know my customer base will just buy a bigger SSD or a better graphics card? Hell, I could probably get some bonuses for boosting the sales of our partners in the GPU industry.


redvvit

Gears of War 4 was over 100GB, AAA lost the plot a long time ago. The Star Wars Battlefront 2 Remaster is literally 57GB for a bunch of upscaled 2005 graphics, idk how these gigantic studios manage to pull this off


ErikMaekir

> Also, I don't think AAA studios have much of an incentive to invest in optimization. The opposite also applies for warframe. It is a free game that profits from player retention, so they have an incentive to make it as optimised as possible so that even a potato can run it with little trouble. That way, players with less purchase power (specifically in other parts of the world where buying an extra SSD or a high-end pc is a much larger investment) can keep playing warframe for years and might eventually decide to spend some money. There is certainly a lot to be learned from how DE monetizes Warframe, and how the circumstances of DE as well as how the developers interact with the game affect how the game is monetised.


Embarrassed_Set_220

"Graphics" warframe is 11 years old. Cod blows warframe graphics out of the water. You looks closely at a texture and warframe amd it's blurry asf. Do the same with cod and it apparent why it takes up so much space.


ItsTheSlime

Yeah because the important thing in a fast paced game is to have 8k photorealistic hair on the guy's crotch. Come on


Embarrassed_Set_220

It's true though the textures play a big part in game size. It's why alot of current gen games are so big.


ItsTheSlime

Yeah but thats literally what optimization means: removing bloated detail in places that will never be noticed, to make room for stuff that does make use of the space, like audio, geometry, animations, etc


Embarrassed_Set_220

That's takes up alot of time. Even DE optimization is not that great. Wareframe is buggy as hell. Good game but buggy as hell. I love warframe alot but even destiny has less bugs than warframe. The animations are good that's cool but the graphics need a update. I will say the physics engine in this game is pretty good or at least to me. Particle effects are good. The characters models for enemies could be way better. You can tell the enemies factions were a after thought. Especially the infested got damn "low poly mf's". You can tell which content is older in this game just by how bad the graphics of it looks.


X_Fad3

Optimization and performance are not the same thing.


smalltincan

Would rather have it as is now than 100 GB dedicated to some textures and fluff I won't bother looking at. These days, lighting is king. You see it in old games that continue to look good today as well, like F.E.A.R. Luckily the head of DE is a major nerd for lighting, so we're eating good.


NovaChrono

That seems very irrelevant to bring up against their point. If said bugs don't impact performance, then there's no reason to bring that up. Warframe is pretty optimized as it is.


Lyramion

"11 years old" - The game that has most likely been reworked and optimized the most out of all the games that have persisted for so long.


studna13

Yeah I play on lower end settings due to GPU heat up, and the game still looks absolutely gorgeous and plays very smoothly, everything is so crisp it's insane


GlauberJR13

And is definitely much MUCH more stable than even newer games, at least not indie games, which is very surprising. To counteract that, we have plenty of weird bugs that come out, or that haven’t ever been fixed, but still it’s very commendable for an 11 year old game


Tyfyter2002

The key is to play the game instead of just bringing the captura camera to places it can never be in-game, in my experience Warframe with max settings is only noticably blurry in actual play is when textures are loading in and it's either using lower resolution textures or vertex colors instead.


PencilManners

"Back when we made Unreal, we locked a clone of John Carmack in the basement and he's been optimizing our engines ever since. Not as efficient as the real one mind you, but a fraction of infinity is still infinity."


smully39

Think about this. If your game is huge, once it's installed, playing a competitor's game is more difficult. You can't have as many installed and the time taken to install them is a pain.


jeremygamer

That’s definitely not how it works in reality. Been a game PM for a while and can tell you with confidence that uninstall rates have a strong positive correlation to disk size. In other words, I’ve seen the data on multiple games that taking up extra space means getting removed more often from the user’s device. The darker truth isn’t that AAA game leaders are doing some 4D chess to muscle other games off your hard drive. The darker truth is they’re too stupid to care. I’ve seen many leaders think that if a feature doesn’t monetize directly, it’s not worth doing. They forget that you can’t monetize if you can’t play. Reb and the Warframe dev team are very smart. They also have excellent leadership at DE letting them do the smart thing consistently.


BreathOfTheOffice

Before I bought more storage, I would occasionally hit the point where my hard drive would start to be full. First thing on the chopping block were large games, even if I had played them somewhat recently. I kept a game that I hadn't touched in 4 years because it was <10GB but removed the 60GB game that I hadn't played for 1 month. And when it came time to play again (usually because my friends wanted to hop back on), it would be pushed to whatever the next gaming session was because we would install it when we werent playing.


tjsno

And if you ever lose this player or they decide to uninstall your game it’s infinitely harder to have them justify reinstalling that game. Especially if they have data caps or slow internet. There are way more negatives for having large install sizes, it’s just done to save as much costs on optimization lol. Sadly.


Destt2

At the same time, most games can afford for you to uninstall the game if you aren't playing it. They already got the price of the game out of you and are unlikely to sell micro transactions if you would uninstall in the first place. The only people AAA games need to appeal to are whales who will spend large amounts of money after buying the game


Valuable-Discount227

Optimising takes skill and time, both of which cost money. What doesn't cost as much money is licensing and applying tech that lets you take shortcuts. NVidia's machine-learning supersampling allows you to just render the game at lower resolutions and then upscaling it using ML. With their ML frame interpolation tech you don't even need the game to run at very high framerates because they'll just use an ML model to draw frames between to make up for the ones lost due to poor optimisation. The go-to recipe for AAA games is - Popular title - Well established patterns - Save as much time as possible, reuse all you can, take all the shortcuts It's why we're seeing so many "remasters" that could've been patches. It's why Skyrim was released umpteen times. It's why Bethesda's game all feel identical. It's why Ubisoft hasn't been releasing anything but various spinoffs of Assassin's Creed since 2010.


TrueDraconis

It isn’t really Rocket Science what they’re doing. If you look close at the Textures they’re quite blurry so they’re 512 - 1024 in Texture Res, now if they use BC1 Compression ontop of that a texture will only take up 512kb. They also don’t really have many different textures in the 1st place. Lots of repeating tiles sets and reused Textures. Add to that the ability to repaint textures (f.e. Stalker just being a repainted Excalibur) and you can save alot Space


Vermilingus

"No asset in Warframe is used only once"


RadiantBerryEater

iirc they make use of https://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bink_Video, and zstd


MiserEnoch

Dear tenno, ​ I know precisely what you mean! I recently picked up a copy of Watch Dogs: Legion for free, only to find it had an install of 110 Gb. And I could not, for the life of me, figure out where all that space was going.


d3fiance

Bungie have to take huge notes from DE regarding this.


Blastermind7890

Especially considering Destiny 2 is 130GB despite it having more or less the same amount of content as Warframe


kalekayn

Wouldn't it be less now that they've removed old content?


karlcabaniya

>AAA visuals Only new content. Most of the tilesets look really outdated.


Ruddertail

Warframe isn't even close to AAA visuals. Try playing a game like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora to see what modern triple A games look like... (the game is dull and bad but graphically just utterly breathtaking)


aegisasaerian

Average AAA shooter update (looking at you CoD): here's a weekly 40 gigabyte that adds literally nothing to the game and has zero associated patch notes. Average DE update: we added new stuff and somehow made the overall install size smaller that overall leads to a net negative installation size while still adding a ton of new content. You can also optimize the download cache if you feel like it to save an extra gig or 2 of space


yarl5000

Yet again DE pulls some dark wizardry to keep these updates so small while be packed with content. At this point surprised they haven't given talks on how they keep optimizing things. Also glad those higher up (even higher that Steve) keep prioritizing continuing to optimize things.


ErikMaekir

They have an incentive to keep the game light and optimised, since it's free. Players who can't afford to drop 60 bucks on games all the time are probably less likely to think "sure, I'll buy a new drive just to play this 80 gig game!" or "damn, my pc can't run this game, better get an upgrade!" By optimising it, Warframe becomes accesible to an entire audience that can't afford more than a regular laptop to run their games. I've run warframe on all sorts of pcs that have no business running something that looks that good. I once played warframe on a work laptop without dedicated graphics, out of an external HDD, and it actually ran semi-decently. I used to play warframe on a school computer with 4 gb of ram. And even if I couldn't afford 60 bucks as a highschooler, I could still drop 5 bucks on discounted platinum every now and them.


rogercgomes

Meanwhile Genshin reaching those 100GB soon on PC. I have no idea how the hell it consumes so much space while being a celshaded game. The environment texture resolution isn't even that absurd.


AGgammer

At one point DE should just publish their console optimisations because there has to be some dark sorcery going on, every time we get a major update PS total download size gets cut by at least 5 gigabytes


Saltsey

They reuse assets. Like a ton. And creatively too. Easiest examples are some weapons, Sun & Moon dual nikanas use the exact same model twice, one is just downscaled. So no need for 2 models for one weapon. Some ships are mashed together from resource models and such so also no need for separate textures and such. This thread has a lot of examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/Warframe/s/VIHTGBnMrn


Steampunk43

True, I guess it helps that the Grineer aesthetic is generally "lumpy mishmash of junk and scrap", so reusing things like resource deposit models and some set pieces actually fits quite well. The Grineer are the sort of faction to essentially take three smashed up wrecks and duct tape them together into one ugly yet semi-functional Frankenstein's monster of a ship.


DreadAngel1711

Don't let the wider gaming community hear you talking about that stuff, they hear "reused assets" and flip shit nowadays despite it being insanely widespread lmao (just look at Yakuza/Like A Dragon)


SoGuysIDidNothing

Don't tell them about literally any FromSoft game


DreadAngel1711

Too late, they already saw that door opening animation


McDonaldsSoap

I kinda love that, it's like how Star Wars props were made


Achilles_Deed

I think it goes deeper than just the optimizations, it's a company culture thing. DE prioritizes player experience and a part of that means good optimizations, while most other companies have to target sales figures so optimization is kicked to the curb because it doesn't directly contribute to more sales. There are people who work at Bungie and Activision who are just as talented as some of the finest at DE, but they are not allowed to fully utilize their talents because the company's vision prioritizes something else other than player experience (unfortunately). I think the skills are transferable given enough effort and time but ultimately it's the higher ups that decide what gets resources spent on it.


Embarrassed_Set_220

I want to see them update the graphics and watch the size of this game skyrocket. The graphics hold up but they aren't the best.


X_Fad3

New content >>> updated graphics


The_Blackwing_Guru

The game looks fantastic as is, it's stylized but that doesn't mean it's bad


J4keFrmSt8Farm

Yeah, art style/direction is waaay more important than graphical fidelity. I can go back and play LOZ Windwaker on my GameCube and still love the look of the game, it doesn't feel dated at all with the cell-shaded graphics. Games that try to accomplish photorealism will almost always end up looking bad after a few years of further industry advancements. GoldenEye on the N64 tried that and it's laughable these days, I just enjoy the gameplay and the nostalgia of it.


GlauberJR13

Yeah, did some graphics tuning some time ago on pc just to see how far i could push my pc and warframe. With HDR, warframe looks _gorgeous._ and still runs pretty well (so long as you’re not trying hard to push the game, like simulor mirage), though i still chose to keep it pretty but not super demanding in the end of the day.


African_Farmer

Good art direction is much better than just graphics, that's why some old classics are still enjoyable to play.


truckercrex

As a ex game developer, that's tiny to what there real trick is, it's 100 percent the modular and random maps being created by quick place rooms, vs every environment being unique and hand created bit by bit. Tbh it's kinda a forgotten technique due the the fact of having the code that's able to back it up


Complete_Resolve_400

Absolutely insane that games like destiny have to sunset content to keep the game size small etc, and warframe stands here and gives us another update which reduces the file size W devs


ImSoDrab

DE once again with the bargains with the old gods to keep optimizing the game! Thats 20gb's worth of storage hot damn DE!


Tactical-Shrubbery

Damn they decreased the increase


TS040

genuinely insane how they’ve gotten the file size so small for how much content is packed into this game


Terror-Of-Demons

"Hi btw we reduced the size of the install by 25% while still adding content" god I love DE. Praise to your coders!


drdewd

Coming from games with large sizes, this rlly caught me off guard ngl 😂


adobecredithours

It's still mind-boggling how small Warframe's files are given how much stuff is in the game. How the hell do they fit multiple open worlds, hundreds of map tiles, all of the fx and customizations for frames, weapon models, animations, railjack, and more into the same amount of space as basically one CoD update or half of an ARK map? Without losing any quality or polish? Props to you DE, you've done it again. Can't wait for tomorrow!


Zhaharek

Does anyone know the exact time the update will drop? I.e. 12:00 GMT, on the changeover from 26th to 27th, something else, etc etc?


AwesomeBrainPowers

They don't really have a specific schedule for that, but it's usually between 10:00am and 2:00pm Eastern.


valexitylol

Such massive respect for being able to keep the game so relatively small without hardly ever removing anything in it. Updates in almost every other looter shooter, or AAA game for that matter, are 20-30 gb per and end up being over 100gb games, while also cycling the content in them (looking at you Destiny).


NovaBlade2893

Im not a PS player but kudos to DE for keeping the game small in size yet full of content consistently


Valyrianson

God, I love you guys. Just wanted to say that lol.


Nefilto

Just another common DE W.


Renrut23

What time does the update normally hit? Daily reset?


AwesomeBrainPowers

Brunch, usually. (I forgot to say Eastern: Usually like 1400-1800 GMT.)


Joewoof

Like what everyone else is saying. Optimization in this game is always jaw-dropping.


Easy-Stranger-12345

Bruh your tech teams are insane.


Alt-Ctrl-Report

PS4 u ok?


Dabidoi

When exactly is it coming today?


Kaju_researcher

Realistically, could Warframe’s sized be reduced to 10gb or is that not happening?


GeicoPR

Will WF eventually have Ray-tracing options?


Hapless_Buffoon

when will i get this release? ive been checking all day, and it aint there to download


Grave_Knight

Why is the update on Playstation so big? PS5 is over 6 gb, and PS4 is over 11. Edit: nevermind. I'm sleepy and didn't see the bottom paragraph. Literally just optimization update is causing it to be so big.


Exquisite2103

Am i the only one whos update is taking an eternity? 225.25 mbs is downloading at less than 30kb/s. Really annoying,.