https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fAS0ButR2E
So the plan on Friday was to have a nice leisurely day. Stop by Chik-fil-A on the way to work and surprise my co-workers with some of those chicken-mini biscuits, wander through the maintenance tasks at a nice leisurely pace, have a nice leisurely lunch, and pick up a copy of the game while on the lunch break, and if there weren’t any emergencies, run by the house and start installing Red Dead Redemption on the way back to the office. I figured that by the time I got home and had a nice leisurely Anniversary dinner with Maribou, that I might be able to squeeze in a nice leisurely session of gaming before bed and have some first impressions to post for Saturday morning.
Of course, I walk into the test lab at 8:45 with a tray of breakfast to find my co-workers deep in phone conversation with the boss in Singapore about the various goings on that needed to be fixed Right Now. By 10:00 AM, we figured that we needed to rebuild some of the servers with the latest (hours old) build and see if we could recreate the problem the site was having. By 10:30, the servers were rebuilt.
By noon we figured out that we couldn’t recreate it.
So then we had to bundle up the new build and stage it for him (and maybe install it for him) so that he could start work as soon as he woke up (Singapore’s on a flipped schedule from ours) and when I got to the production site, I walk in and immediately hear “JAYBIRD! YOU’RE HERE!” (which is never a good sign) and, yes, apparently even more stuff broke. So I call Maribou and reschedule dinner. I then go on to spend the rest of the day in the lab until it was morning in Singapore fixing what I could fix remotely, then being walked through the stuff that I didn’t know also needed fixing, and then hammering out that the root problem was local (to Singapore) hardware.
Anyway, I got home at 9:15 (would have gotten home at 9, but I stopped by the store to pick up a copy of my game). Started installing RDR2.
And it’s not halfway installed yet and it’s bedtime. Maybe even past bedtime.
But the game looks positively gorgeous. The box, I mean.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is promotional image for Red Dead Redemption 2 from Rockstar’s twitter feed.)
Disk 1 installed overnight.
Now Disk 2 is installing.Report
Okay, we’re installed.
Seriously, you need to put aside 4 hours for disk one to install and an hour, hour and a half, for the second.
For your own sanity: Do not buy this game and think you’ll be playing it 10 minutes after you get home.Report
Seriously, you need to put aside 4 hours for disk one to install and an hour, hour and a half, for the second.
What are they doing, compiling it from source?Report
As far as I can tell, it’s to reduce (if not eliminate) loading times.
(Of course, they might have just figured out a way to have loading times happen at the same time as cutscenes… of which there are many.)Report
Imagine there’s someone at Rockstar whose job is to figure out how to minimize loading times. That Rockstar employee has to remote into a server from Scotland to the USA and Japan, trying to figure out the particularities of the PS4’s hardware to ensure there are no 0-day bugs and people can start prowling the prairie as Arthur Morgan.
They have a lot in common with you. Except they probably smoke weed.Report
I’m not complaining, not really. Now that it’s installed, I don’t mind not having been able to play the day I got it.
I guess I’m just old and remember back when you plugged in a cartridge and you were playing the game 2 seconds after that.Report
I think he understands why it gets installed to the hard disk; the question is why it takes that long. The Internet says it’s a 100GB install; five hours means it’s writing about one gigabyte every three minutes, or 5 megabytes per second. Even allowing for the fact that this is on hardware that wasn’t top-of-the-line when it was released five years ago, that’s pretty slow.Report
I have no idea. I just know that I put in the first of two disks and it said “okay, four hours” and an hour and a half later I checked and it wasn’t lying.
So I went to bed.Report
I was just being a smart-ass. Given optical media, if there’s any head seeking at all the total read time is going to be high.Report
Yeah, I guess extensive seeking would slow it down, but it’s not obvious to me why it would be needed. I would expect them to lay it out on the disc such that it could just be streamed by the installer.Report
Copying a disc sector every few minutes, in between mining Bitcoins.Report
First thought: I’ve played about 3 or 4 hours now.
The game has finally said “okay, go ahead and do what you want”.
I’m in here writing this comment because I am experiencing massive choice paralysis.Report
I had the same feelings. I wanted to explore more from the very beginning but the game forces you to go through a lengthy prologue before giving you total freedom. The intro reminded me a lot of GTA V, same snowy weather, same situation (running from trouble) and even the death of a crew member.Report