FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH gets a smaller download on Steam Deck
Square Enix have updated FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH and they've managed to cut down the download size for the Steam Deck and by quite a bit too.
I hope the Steam Deck-specific content depot gets used more often.
I also wonder if the Steam CLI can download from it on other platforms. I'm running a 4060 on my desktop, so being able to trim out all the texture bloat I can't even run would be a godsend.
Yeah, that shit is getting absurd.
Comparing a fresh download between my Steam Deck and Desktop Linux, the Steam Deck download for it is now 88.1GB whereas on Desktop it's showing as 144.2GB.
88 GB is already kind of annoying, especially when you have slow internet, but 144 GB (much of that probably 4k textures, uncompressed audio and similar stuff) just fucking sucks.
There's an old adage about computer programs endlessly expanding to gobble up every resource as computers improve. Nowhere is it more obvious than in gaming. Textures you'll never use, translations included in the default download for no good reason, the same files duplicated many times over because it gives a slight improvement to load times on consoles, delta patches using up an entire CPU core and taking longer than simply redownloading the whole game, ten minutes spent compiling thousands of bespoke shaders on startup...
Ugh, shader compilation is the worst since it can ruin an entire planned gaming session. As annoying and performance-crippling as it is in its early stages, I can't wait for ray tracing to become the default (ironic since it's Wirth's Law's current reigning champion). Modern computer graphics are built on hacks upon hacks upon hacks. Ray tracing, by virtue of acting how light actually acts, cuts the Gordian Knot and vastly simplifies things. Hopefully it'll help do away with the multitude of shaders used to imitate perfect lighting through imperfect means and we can just simply run our games again.
