Hey I’m just kinda curious why we have such a large client for retail over 80gb now.
Fortunately this isn’t the only game I play and space adds up on my collection of SSDs.
Since 80-90% of your game is an old forgotten junkyard can we opt in to a current expansion only client? That’s what you want right? Funnel everyone into latest expansion?
It’s be great to release 70 gigs or so on my MMO ssd.
Thank you.
I just stuck WoW on my D drive where I have oodles of space.
Let’s not pretend 80GB is even weird in 2022.
the vast majority of it is HD textures and effects. These are done client-side instead of server side because it’d cause a TON of lag otherwise.
um, it’s not. That is the problem. Games are huge now. I need more space for other games. WoW’s old content is forgotten every expansion now, even every patch. We need a current expansion only client as a choice.
Too much of WoW sends you back into old areas. Even if its not often, it happens, so segmenting it based on expansion is next to impossible. Not to mention they’d have to do away with leveling entirely to even make this a realistic talking point.
WoW’s a huge game built up over the years, it’s going to be a big file.
They cannot just sever you from everything and restrict you to one expansion land, that’s just not how the game can ever work. And who would even want to play that kind of WoW anyways?
But 80 for WoW is actually pretty space efficient in comparison to other games. Blizz has done a great job minimizing it. Games in general these days take up a lot more room than they used to, it’s not just WoW.
Sounds like a silly excuse, if you get sent back to a zone which is not often in Shadowlands, they can download that zone I guess for the expansion client. Definitely sounds impossible. /s
Or…welp…maybe it’s time to quit for a bit.
I’ve also got a ton of technical limits - I’m on an old macbook. I can barely run anything with WoW installed and frankly I can barely run the game itself.
This is my last month until I can save up for a better computer and an external drive. :3 Not just for wow mind you, I’d love to play more games - but goodness me gaming’s an expensive hobby to pursue. 
WoW would be perfectly playable downloading shadowlands content and textures and streaming old zones when you have to go there for a quest. The client already does this. Unfortunately it just downloads the whole game when you start it instead of choosing which content you want.
Imagine a large plate of spaghetti.
That’s the code.
I don’t have technical limits. I have financial limits on how many SSDs I want to buy and keep stored away with the games I play. I want to make room for other games.
I know a lot of people here only play WoW but I don’t. Why is having a client side choice of which expansion to download a bad thing? I know I would get arguments against this just because its GD forums…but jeez. -_-
I lold
/10
It has nothing to do with code. It’s the media that takes up lots of space. Textures, cinematic, pictures, etc.
Wow appears to be built to contain the data to allow you to play any version of the game without having to redownload the entire game for each resulting in less space usage if you play more than one version of wow.
I highly doubt Blizz would ever make an entirely new client just to house current xpac data.
Financial limits, technical limits, same thing luv. At least regarding this. Your financial limit creates your technical limit - and frankly I agree with everybody - and you. Yes, it would be nice and it’d save space - but I think it’d be extremely difficult to do, and it’d compromise the integrity of creating a true world of warcraft. I don’t want them to focus expansion by expansion, I want them to pull a MoP and do everything.
You’d never be able to go anywhere else or do anything else. You’d be permanently bound to that one small group of islands with no auction house, unless you’re an engineer. You’d never be able to level a new character. Better hope they don’t do what they did in SL or BfA and take you back to the old zones.
You are not getting arguments against.
You are getting explanations of why not.
My advice would be to build your own desktop so you can swap out components as you save up money. If you have a technical savvy friend they could help build it for you and then show you how to do simple things like swap out the hard drive. Hard drives by themselves are incredibly cheap these days.
With laptops, most of the components are soldered onto the motherboard or are part of a system on a chip that can’t be taken apart. Also the price for laptop components is usually higher because they have to be smaller and there’s no room for extra cooling. The entire thing has to be designed in one go so that thermal profile does’t melt anything inside of the case.
With a desktop you can buy a used, older generation graphics card and just plug it into any available PCIe slot with enough lanes.
exactly why do I need 10-15gb of intro cinematics installed when I have watched them client side… never?
All the cinematics for previous expansions all that stuff can be streamed (The client already streams so you can play while downloading)
It just doesn’t make sense to me. I know 80 gb is not a lot… I just got the FF7Remake and it is 110 gb lol. Just need room for new games tired of buying new SSDs.
Have you ever downloaded the game and before it finished downloading hit play? The game content streams just fine and is perfectly playable even at my 7mb/s. It wouldn’t be hard to make that server side like many games do, and I think it would make sense to include you faction capital in the client.
And none of them are very good when you can play the game while downloading it. So?
You got me there. touché 
You don’t understand how much infrastructure is required to get you HD videos buffered on your device by companies like Google. You have to have a very large edge network, many levels of caching, and they have to be geolocated close to customers. Game servers don’t work like that. With game servers nothing can be cached, everyone has to connect to the same sever. It’s all real time. So Blizzard would have to invest in a CDN just for cinematic which would cost them millions upon millions of dollars to save you a few gigabytes of disk space. It would make no sense whatsoever. And you’d still have to buffer and hope you have a stable internet connection with enough bandwidth to make it semi-seamless with whatever else is going on in the game, which could literally be the middle of a raid.