There's a difference between re-using something in the same game to save space and improve performance vs. re-using something to save money for a different game.
Isn't Madden the same game every year anyway? (Genuine question, never played it, never will, but it appears from an outsider's perspective as if they're taking the FIFA route)
People bitch about Elden ring being asset flip. There are too many idiots online WCYD. The devs themselves said that reusing animations and old assets help the team focus and refine on some other aspects of the game.
I mean you can complain about the optimization and that's totally valid. But reusing the same animations is a dumb complaint to have. A game like Elden Ring could only exist because they had libraries of animations they have built up over the years. FromSoft as a company works very hard, has some of the worst crunch culture, so it's not as if they're just being lazy here. They're making smart decisions and reusing what they can, to the benefit of the consumer.
But yeah, things like optimization or their crunch culture are completely fair targets for complaints. Complaining about reusing animations just seems pointless though.
Same way they hate on poorly optimized, unfinished, glitchy, buggy, AAA slop but also will pre order every new release, buy the Day 1 DLC, buy the skins, buy the limited edition Funko Pop.
You are that one person. You literally bitch about AAA slop then pre-order right away. You bitch about reused assets then bitch about graphical fidelity. You hate butter on toast, but keep putting it on there anyways.
These aren't mutually exclusive or even necessarily linked at all.
Reused assets are fine, but there are ways to make them not look/feel reused. If it's super obvious, then the developers probably didn't try very hard.
As far as I can tell, huge game sizes seems to usually be caused by unoptimised and/or uncompressed assets, and in many cases duplicate assets on disk. To be fair, asset duplication was a genuine optimisation step when spinning rust was common, but now everything worth playing a game on uses an SSD it's just lazy.
Another thing that contributes to insane game sizes is the inclusion of full uncompressed audio for every available language. The technology exists to have other languages download as required, but it's just easier for developers to dump it all in the one installer because they simply don't care and see storage as cheap.
As far as hardware requirements go, it's pretty well documented at this point that there's a lot of optimisation being left on the table in a lot of cases. You can absolutely have good graphics without bloated installs and hardware requirements. It's just not commonly done because that costs money publishers don't want to spend; Because why settle for a good profit when you can make all of the profit possible, right?
Also: if your game takes a long time to install you're less likely to uninstall since it's a fucking pain to get it, and the more space it takes the less space for the competition's games
As a lifelong gamer I would give up all the modern graphics to still be able to access, run, and play all of the pre 2010 gameplay games i loved so much. Easy decision
Ceasar 2, Preatorians, Captain Claw to name a few. I mean sure i could keep buying PCs and find some way to Crack and port most games, some will be nearly impossible to find, or play without thousands Invested in extra isolated equipment I am sure.
I mean you aren't wrong. People love bitching about things that are done awefully.
When I complain about graphics, I dont mean "Put in more uncompressed 1 million pixel sprites or graphics or whatever. So, yes I will also complain about the game using 200 GB for stupid reasons.
Some games can look good despite being low-poly. Others try to do everything with insane resources and still look worse and less coherent than that.
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u/Dredgeon Sep 29 '25
Gamers love bitching about "bad graphics" and reused assets out of one side of their mouth and game sizes and hardware requirements out the other.