You have to download it anyway. If you have the space you can probably specify a high cache volume. Then after a while the streaming would slow down. So whether you download it upfront or during gameplay. In the end it’s more or less the same amount of data. So the whole data cap point is pretty moot. Unless your storage is low and it keeps clearing the cache. But then you wouldn’t be able to play in the other situation at all, or very limited.
And let’s be fair, if your ISP has a data cap less that 10s of TB (or at all) they are scamming you big time. Yay for monopolies eh?
Edit:
Thinking about it, streaming the data probably would cause a lower data usage as they can apply LOD tricks and culling, etc. Which they wouldn’t be able to do when you have to pre-download it.
Unpacking compressed files will always be cheaper in Internet usage. And if they wanted to go this direction they could have just streamed the output for far cheaper usage as well.
They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.
What makes you think it isn’t an option? Most people probably aren’t using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren’t going to come near 95% of it.
They do not have to stream it. PC hard drives come in the multiples of TB these days.
You have to download it anyway. If you have the space you can probably specify a high cache volume. Then after a while the streaming would slow down. So whether you download it upfront or during gameplay. In the end it’s more or less the same amount of data. So the whole data cap point is pretty moot. Unless your storage is low and it keeps clearing the cache. But then you wouldn’t be able to play in the other situation at all, or very limited.
And let’s be fair, if your ISP has a data cap less that 10s of TB (or at all) they are scamming you big time. Yay for monopolies eh?
Edit: Thinking about it, streaming the data probably would cause a lower data usage as they can apply LOD tricks and culling, etc. Which they wouldn’t be able to do when you have to pre-download it.
Unpacking compressed files will always be cheaper in Internet usage. And if they wanted to go this direction they could have just streamed the output for far cheaper usage as well.
They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.
What makes you think it isn’t an option? Most people probably aren’t using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren’t going to come near 95% of it.