I wouldn't consider myself a "serious" gamer, since I usually wait a year or two before picking up games and don't put many hours in a week, but I stay up on the latest gaming news, and I do play games every so often (and play them heavily when I do).

However, I have a dual-core processor. I also have 800 GB harddrive space, and (just recently) 1TB RAID1 networked storage.

I incrementally upgrade some pieces every so often (the videocard was updated in 2009, for example, the RAM was upgraded (to only 3GB(!)) in 2013.

It's an aging computer (bought in 2007), but it currently serves my purpose (but is nearing its end of life), and I intend to get as much real-world value out of my real-world money investment that I made when I purchased the machine before I replace it. I'm getting very good milage (which is very real money saved) out of it.

This is just common sense, unless you are a computer hardware enthusiast.

Not everyone who is a gamer is also a computer technician or hardware hobbyist.

I would consider it silly to think that everyone who'd be likely to want to play the game would also have a high-end machine, and I'd think it bad for business for EA to limit their market to only those people.

There are more people buying modern games than there are people who are techy about hardware. I occasionally get calls from otherwise intelligent family members asking me if new game X will run on their machine, or what kind of machine they should buy to play new game Y.

Even when they do, they always have a reasonable budget, and it's always sub-$1000. There is a limit to how much they feel comfortable investing just so they can play a game. They need a computer anyway, but if the difference is between a $400 or $500 laptop, and a $900 laptop capable of playing the latest $60 game, then the actual cost of that game (in their mind) is $460. That's not a number EA wants them to be thinking about.

They just haven't learned hardware (and frankly, I don't know much about it either - I just happen to be the only above-average techy person on their contact list) - and learning hardware shouldn't be a prerequisite to playing games. Even modern games.

Further, how many people hyped up on the latest game are kids or young teens?

"Mom, can I buy Game X? It's $60!" -> "Sounds expensive, but maybe for your birthday."

"Mom, can I buy a new $1400 gaming machine?" -> "Uh, no."

Also, they are wanting to sell the game globally, not just to Americans. What kind of hardware does the average gamer have worldwide? The minimum spec will start there, and increase as EA decides to cut out one area or another.

They also want to sell to the growing age of gamers, including people working 9-to-5 jobs, or in college, who don't have time (or find it a gross waste of money) to constantly upgrade their machines on a bi-annual basis.

What is the market audience EA is going for?

- A) Only people willing to pay $1400 for a high-end machine every two years?

- B) Only people knowledgeable enough in hardware to build (or incrementally upgrade) their own machine for less than $1400?

- C) Only people living in the United States?

- D) Only people over 18 y/o?

Or perhaps they want to be able to sell the game to anybody and everybody willing to hand over $60, and don't want to field millions of support calls from people crying that they didn't read the minimum specs, and don't even know what "a vram" or "a core quad" is, or whether a GeForce 8800 GT is better or worse than a GeForce GTX 560. I mean, surely the large number means it's better right?

(For the record, I also find the 35GB of uncompressed audio a ridiculous thing, and bet they could've come up with a much better solution if they had more time. I'm also not too interested in Titanfall, though I might buy it for $10 on Steam in two years or so when it is on sale)

This is important information to keep in mind if you are developing games for market. You are not the average consumer. I am not the average consumer, and even I have a machine that many people in this thread seem to think is "rare".

This is important information to keep in mind if you are developing games for market. You are not the average consumer. I am not the average consumer, and even I have a machine that many people in this thread seem to think is "rare".

That is where the different viewpoints are interesting.

I think it is fun to contrast the industry veterans against the less experienced people.

Industry vets: "do not care", "time/money constraints", "business decision", and "the game sucks, who cares."

Others: "Could have been smaller!" "optimization!", "insanity", and my favorite "low spec is rare among high spec players"

Put me firmly in the "do not care" bucket. Modern games are big. Titanfall is 48GB. WoW is a decade old at 25GB. Ghost Recon was 25GB. Force Unleashed was 30GB. Max Payne 3 was 35GB.

The two biggest sources of size are all the pre-recorded audio (which this thread discusses) and the high definition textures.

Gamers keep crying for more unique lines, don't make everyone say the same thing. Give us complex dialog trees with three branches each, for each gender, and based on previous gameplay choices. The end result is that a single plot point might involve 300 or more potential lines of recorded dialog.

Taking this to the extreme, SW:TOR had over 200,000 lines of dialog. Some of them were rather long speeches, all in very high quality. They account for the vast majority of the 30GB space requirements.

Titanfall seems to have followed this same vein. All the reviews talk about the extensive recorded dialog. It seems every grunt has its own collection of voice dialogue based on a bunch of conditions. Nobody likes to hear the same lines of dialogue repeatedly. So it takes a lot of space, not a big deal. I don't want to go back to the days where all 50 people in the town are limited to the words "Please talk to the king!"

But I do care that a PC version of a game contains several dozen gigabytes of data which are effectively useless, since the same result could be achieved by properly encoding audio for the PC version. If I wanted to waste disk space, I could do it myself by creating a large file and writing random data in it.

Your disk is likely NTFS formatted.

Right click the folder. Click "Properties". Click "Advanced...". Click "Compress". Wait 3 hours while the disk churns. Or if you plan ahead, mark the folder as compressed before the install takes place. Several gigabytes recovered. Done.

If you are on a min-spec machine, expect poor performance during audio playback and other loading as decompression must take place. If you are on a high spec machine, it doesn't matter because you have the cycles to burn on decompression.

You completely missed the point

Perhaps I did. Or perhaps I understood your point and intentionally avoided it.

Let's consider this as a business decision.


The facts we know about it are (1) There was a serious bug, ostensibly related to min-spec machines but potentially related to anything in the audio system, and (2) the solution that shipped was to use uncompressed audio.

Game is really big. A big investment, a big marketing push, and a big risk.

Game has firm deadlines.

Game was probably running very late and over budget.

Quite likely game had issues getting through first-party certification, so dev and QA focus was redirected away from PC launch.

Quite likely after console games have been finalized and in the final push to get PC polished, focus resumes to PC.
Game requires fairly high-spec equipment, but business demands relatively low end machines for min-spec, so QA focuses on older boxes.
QA discovers nasty problem on min-spec machines, or crash in audio codec, or other serious bug.

Leads and management discuss options for the bug:
A: Delay the PC version of the game to fix a min-spec problem, costing many million dollars.
B: Increase the min-spec, issue pre-release refunds, change marketing mid-progress, all costing a few million dollars.
C: Use uncompressed audio and if necessary fix it in a patch. Irritates some customers, but does not cost millions.
D, E, F, G: Additional options that were obviously dismissed.

Management decides C is least risky and least costly. It also has a side effect of making min-spec machines less likely to buy the game, which is good, because performance on min-spec is usually pretty terrible. This option solves many issues, reduces the overall number of complaints (at the risk of a small number of vocal but easily dismissed complaints), and can be remedied cheaply if there is backlash.

The short version of the thought process is what they gave in the press release: There was a bug on min-spec and the business decision is to use uncompressed audio.



If you have bought Titanfall for PC and you are honestly concerned about hard drive space (which is very unlikely) then compress the folder with all the audio in it, or get a bigger drive.

I see this as not a non-issue. If enough players complain it will likely be corrected in one of the first patches, which usually follow a week or two after the initial launch. By the time it becomes available on Steam it will likely be addressed, and the size reduced by around 30GB.