Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.
Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.
That’s not how it works at all, what are you even talking about?
Most games that offer this feature download a limited set of the game files. For example the first few areas of the game (but with full quality, no low resolution bullshit). The idea is that as you play it keeps downloading the rest. Though if you play too fast or load in a save you might hit a wall where the game forces you to wait and download the rest.
Other games like Guild Wars 2 (an MMO) does it differently. It downloads all the assets it needs and the starting zones. But you can actually go into end-game zones too with a partial download, but then you have to wait in a loading screen while the game only downloads the zone you want to go to.
The big game sizes are usually sounds and overall content (cinematics, also textures but you don’t have to load all of them, only the ones needed for now), if 99% of players are in the starting area of the game while downloading you can take your sweet time to download endgame areas for example.
I guess we have experienced it in different games, the only ones I have experienced it with have been either phone games that do it your way because of the 100 mb limit Google puts on free apk downloads or computer games that do it my way because of 4k texture file sizes and texture streaming systems. I hadn’t seen it in a computer game before texture streaming.
I have only seen a “play as you finish downloading” in 4 computer games and in those 4 cases it was all due to texture streaming. I had never experienced it for any other reason on a computer game. And of course a game with texture streaming is going to have larger texture files, otherwise they wouldn’t have felt the need to stream them. It’s the whole point of that system. So textures can be much larger without impacting performance.