Search the Community

Today more than ever, (fast) storage space is expensive. One thing that always makes me mad is the insane amount of unused Localizations, game modes (often dead/closed multiplayer modes) that are installed by default - this is literally dead content. Wasted storage. Wasted money. Now back in ye old days, it used to be a gigabyte at best. Not the end of the world, and not exactly worth the time investment. But old habits die hard, and I'm still doing it today. With games becoming larger and larger, storage has become an issue that can thankfully be alleviated. I'm going to list a few interesting examples, then propose a solution and finally suggest a way to integrate it to PCGW's structure. I'll also list a couple of issues with my proposal, potential flaws and uses cases etc. If you have a better idea or any suggestion to make this a thing, you're more than welcome. Please note that all the numbers given are taken from Steam, but GoG, Uplay, EGS & Origin are guilty of the very same thing. Uplay's even worse, as always. Any constructive feedback would be much appreciated - I never suggested a feature before, but this one has been on the back of my mind for at least a year. I feel like it could be very useful to many folks out there. So, let's get to it. Those are easy ones to "clean-up" (more on that later): Batman Arkham Origins. Had a multiplayer mode, servers are down. Delete one folder and the install size goes from 27.06Gb to 18.1Gb. 9Gb (33%) saved Final Fantasy XIII. Well documented, check the PCGW entry for it, you can remove ~20Gb if you don't want the Japanese audio. 57.6Gb to 37.7Gb. 19.9Gb (52%) saved (!!!) Doom 2016. Do you really play the MP or Snapmap modes? That's ~15Gb (11Gb if you only delete the MP) saved. From 69.68Gb to 54.68Gb. 15Gb (21.5%) saved Here's the problem. I can manually delete all localizations, "deluxe edition content", Readme/Support and redists safely from most MT_Framework, UE3 and Ubi games just fine because they use the same naming conventions. All I have to do is search in the root folder for any file with the _ita. suffix for instance and delete it - but that's because I know what I'm doing and I'm willing to take the time to locate and delete those files. Listing that would massively bloat any page of course, and not many users would do it anyways. The best way I can think of to implement a reliable and simple method to delete files that we're absolutely sure are safe to delete goes something like this: Add a "debloatable" boolean to the Other Information infobox, If True, how much can be shaved-off at best. Users like myself could build a database of games we know we can "shave" (much like SK/ReShade compat, with a dedicated page) The end user would download a batch file, hosted here and verified by members based on a template which would include one option for each localization, and a "clean-up" option (remove Readme, Deluxe content, redists if safe) So for instance, I can flag all the localization for Resident Evil 6 and write them down in the dedicated page. I don't have any experience making modular batch files like that however, so someone else would have to make a template. I can then edit that batch to point it to all the files we want to delete. The end user launches the batch file, delete all locales but the one he's/she's using and boom. That's money saved right there. I know there are programs that are much better than Win Explorer's Search feature - if we can feed such a program with a config file it should do the trick too. We'd still need to build a database though. I do realize that I make it sound much easier than it may be, or that it may sound overkill if we're talking about a Gb at best. But for extreme cases like Doom 2016, Far Cry 3/4, FF XIII, the Arkham series, The Evil Within - huge games basically, it would be very helpful and hey, I'm already doing it anyways so might as well share it. There's also games like Battlefront 2 (2005) where you can cut the install size in half. It's about 5Gb (vanilla) if memory serves, about 2-3Gb when cleaned. With that said, if anything I hope that this thread at least brings more attention to this issue. Last but not least, to everyone: Happy holidays! I hope you're all doing well, and ready for more PCGW grunt work for this year to come. "Keep on keeping on".

One feature that I find useful in PC games but, as far as I can tell, isn't documented on this site is resolution scaling, i.e. the ability of a game to internally render at a certain resolution and then scale it to a different one. This offers several advantages over letting the graphics card or display handle scaling including (1) the built-in scaling might be better quality than the scaling offered by the GPU or display (2) it allows elements such as the UI or text to remain at native resolution , and (3) it allows borderless window gaming at non-native monitor resolutions. Like other features that we document, the wiki would note which games natively support this feature, and/or which games it's possible to hack into. What are your thoughts on this?

Steam just implemented these for the store pages themselves. Only about 30 currently say they support any of them, but the feature is only a few days old. It may be worth looking into implementing these for PCGamingWiki. For example Windlands uses a few of them. You can search for games that support the HTC Vive explicitly, or the Oculus Rift explicitly, or Seated/Room-Scale/Standing. Tracked motion controllers is also a new one we don't currently support (AFAIK). See here: Thoughts?