Huge size of GOG games

[RCBH928]

I am looking at many GOG games, and I wonder why are they so big. Baldur's Gate for example is 1.7 GB download....

Were games this huge back in the last century? I think games back then were 200-500mb but I could be wrong?

I've noticed many older games got much bigger sizes that they should be, here I mean older games

[Opa Opa]

I believe the download size is taking into account all the extra stuff you can download (maps, charts, manuals, artwork, soundtracks, et cetera).

[MrPopo]

Baldur's Gate shipped on multiple CDs, either 3 or 4, so that size looks right. Baldur's Gate had a lot of voice acting, which will bump up the file size of things.

[fastbilly1]

The GoG version of Baldurs Gate includes Sword Coast, so it was a five (5) disc install. A straight CD size comparison - at CDs being 700 mbs, would give you 3500 or 3.5 gigs. Now thats not how this works - since most games contain garbage data, and or redundant data, so if you strip that out, and recompress it, it comes out to 1.7 gigs. There are even more downloads you can add in, soundtracks and maps for example, but those are obviously additional.

They have much smaller games:
Darwinia - which came out on a CD and later on a DVD - 40 megs
Ultima 4 - which came out on three (3) 5.25 floppies - 25 megs - and that contains an emulator.

To your point, much older games like Ultima 4 or Beneath a Steel Sky, contain the emulator to make it work. And therefore a bigger download.

[MrPopo]

I remember when CDs first came out, developers who targeted CDs tended to fill up as many CDs as older games had floppies. Voice acting and video files were thrown in because now they had the space for them, but compression at the time was piss poor. Then time went on and a "less is more" philosophy took over, so more stuff got done with in-game assets instead of prerendered video, and at the same time audio compression got much better. Deus Ex has a ton of dialog and all of it is voiced, but the entire game fits on a single CD since all the cutscenes are in-game and the compression on the voice clips is good. I'd have to check when I get home, but I wouldn't be surprised if Baldur's Gate uses wav files for their voices.

[J T]

Sometimes the games have an emulator tacked on as well, either DOSBox or SCUMMVM that takes up extra space in the installer.

Other times, it's just that the whole CD is turned into a file, so you don't save memory space by playing off of CD.

[Pulsar_t]

Compared to the gigantic 10+ GBs of modern PC games retro games are akin to spare change I had Origin a couple of times mess up my BF3 installation, and have it download 16 GB's all over again. What a pain.

Plenty of that old content can be compressed easily, but that would require too much effort. Look at old game rips; most 32-bit era games are rather small in size if you strip away streaming music and FMV's. Even Resident Evil 2 was doable on Nintendo 64.

[GSZX1337]

I thought I'd build upon what others have said by putting things in perspective. In 1999, 1.7GB would be large for a First Person Shooter but not so much for an RPG. PlaneScape Torment has a filesize of 1GB on GoG whereas Unreal Tournament only takes 321MB. It's the cutscenes and voice overs that crank up the size. Hell, Battlefield 1942 took up 1.6GB and that was in 2002.

[Gunstar Green]

Keep in mind you didn't install 1.7 GB of Baldur's Gate onto your PC back in the day, you ran most of the files off of the CDs. That may be why you're remembering these games being small. They weren't small, the CD versions just required much less hard drive space to install.

The GOG versions require you to have all of the game files on your computer so in some cases it's surprising how small the file sizes of these old multiple CD games are actually.

[MrPopo]

I remember how older installers used to have basic, typical, and complete installs. Diablo 2 comes to mind. Basic just copied the game files, with music and cutscenes off the CDs. Multiplayer install also put the music on the hard drive (and you had to do it if you wanted to play on battlenet). Complete would put the cutscenes on your hard drive. Then storage prices came down and compression went up, so they stopped putting in options.