They did say that is the upper end of minimum specs they expect. Once they start optimizing stuff they *might* be lowered. As for the 50 gigs exclamation, thats on par with other mmos these days. 3d modeling of worlds isn't' memory light.
GTX650ti here, dumping that for a 980, yolo swagg, I want to play lords of the fallen without it crashing.
I just installed FF13 via steam. 49 gigs. MMO's tend to be heavy these days, but 49 gigs is insane for a JRPG. Besides, for the amount of goodies we're expected to be able to equip, I'd imagine 50 gigs isn't bad.
Compression is a difficult beast. Nice, losless 1080p video could take a few minutes to decompress. Not many people want to wait that long for a cut scene or intro movie. Though most are made from in-game graphics now anyway. Textures and models are always going to be compressed. Even with good compression, they take a lot of space. The little game I made for Android was hell to keep below 50 megs so I didn't need to split it up and have it download an asset package. I barely had any models or textures at all, and they are all compressed.
For the record a GTX660/650 are not very powerful cards, the entire range of Radeon HD 5XXX High ends and the GTX580 is a more powerful card than the GTX660 and those are 5 years old. PC GPUs usually need to be majorly upgraded every half decade anyway, so it isn't a big surprise for me. You can get a GTX760 for $200 these days.
