High-quality graphics require more resources, but that's just one of many factors.
Fallout creator Tim Cain continues to release blogs on various topics. Recently, he decided to talk about the file sizes of modern games — sometimes a project can take up several hundred GB.
An increase in the size and resolution of monitors played a certain role in this:
Every object you see in a 3D game has a texture, and those textures need to become higher resolution to still look good on higher resolution screens. As screens got bigger, textures got bigger too.
Models are built on a similar principle — they need to use a denser grid, which requires more storage space. Then all these polygons will be rendered on the screen with high-resolution textures.
Optimization further exacerbates the problem, as you need to store multiple versions of many objects, taking into account distance and other factors.
The growing need for higher frame rates (120 - 240+ FPS) also had an impact:
A higher frame rate means a more complex, denser set of animations to make everything look good in motion at such a high FPS. And that's even without in-game cutscenes. Modern games have a huge number of cutscenes, sometimes several opening cinematic videos. Maybe one is shown even before the main menu appears — now, where there used to be a splash screen with the game logo, they show a video.
The audio component also has an impact — music used to be compact:
There is more music, more voice acting, more sound effects. Previously, we used even not 8-bit, but monophonic wav files and compressed them to the limit. Now, full-fledged music tracks and entire libraries of 100+ thousands of voiced lines are added to games.
Tim Cain pointed out another reason for consuming space on drives:
Of course, the fundamental factor that has made modern games so voluminous is art [graphic component].
