Not sure anyone will find this interesting in the slightest, but in Steam as a developer you configure your game as multiple packages they call Depots. You’d have a base package everyone gets, and then other packages which download on top of that for variations. Language is one of the possible variations, and whoever configured steam for Fallout 3 kindly separated them out, presumably because the audio files are quite large and most players will only ever hear one set of them.
Regional differences are also handled this way, often something like a blood texture will be modified for certain regions, and there may also be a Germany specific depot with Nazi symbols modified. Depending on your Steam settings, and where you are in the world, you end up downloading some combination of depots that combine to make one out of potentially dozens of variations of that game.
I don’t know if the Xbox app provides the same functionality, but if so it would be a completely different implementation from Steam and the person who set it up either couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered.
I knew they were depots, but not that they were layered like that, that’s interesting.
Here’s another fact that you might find interesting: when Witcher 2 released, it was about 12GB IIRC, but the entire game was in only a few files because the bulk of all assets were in one large file. Makes things really easy to manage and package up, but Steam didn’t have the ability to patch files, it had to be a full file replacement. So when the first update came out, everyone lost their minds at a 10GB update. Yeah, we don’t bat an eye now at updates that are this big, but back then people were on slow connections, even dial up or DSL < 3mbps.
It was from this that Valve decided to work on Steam’s ability to incrementally patch individual files. The next Witcher 2 update was < 100MB.
Not sure anyone will find this interesting in the slightest, but in Steam as a developer you configure your game as multiple packages they call Depots. You’d have a base package everyone gets, and then other packages which download on top of that for variations. Language is one of the possible variations, and whoever configured steam for Fallout 3 kindly separated them out, presumably because the audio files are quite large and most players will only ever hear one set of them.
Regional differences are also handled this way, often something like a blood texture will be modified for certain regions, and there may also be a Germany specific depot with Nazi symbols modified. Depending on your Steam settings, and where you are in the world, you end up downloading some combination of depots that combine to make one out of potentially dozens of variations of that game.
I don’t know if the Xbox app provides the same functionality, but if so it would be a completely different implementation from Steam and the person who set it up either couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered.
The Steamworks documentation is public for anyone who likes that sort of thing: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/depots
I knew they were depots, but not that they were layered like that, that’s interesting.
Here’s another fact that you might find interesting: when Witcher 2 released, it was about 12GB IIRC, but the entire game was in only a few files because the bulk of all assets were in one large file. Makes things really easy to manage and package up, but Steam didn’t have the ability to patch files, it had to be a full file replacement. So when the first update came out, everyone lost their minds at a 10GB update. Yeah, we don’t bat an eye now at updates that are this big, but back then people were on slow connections, even dial up or DSL < 3mbps.
It was from this that Valve decided to work on Steam’s ability to incrementally patch individual files. The next Witcher 2 update was < 100MB.
I certainly found this interesting. Thank you for sharing 😊