For game size, the Total War series are my biggest issue. I think developers need to have a limit on space again so they start making better use of the space they have available. Pushing against limitations and all that.
That's absurd. The primary users of space nowadays isn't the game world, underlying calculations, or anything else that could be improved by "making better use of space", it's pre-rendered cinematics, 3d models, high quality sound (especially voice acting- two thirds of Dead Rising 3's appalling size in at least the PC release was the alternate-language voices) and high-resolution textures. None can be skimped on without MASSIVE decreases in quality, nor can they be compressed without unacceptable amounts of load time, although in the case of pre-rendered movies in-engine cutscenes can often prove quite acceptable, except in the case of strategy games such as Total War that have rather poor-quality in-game graphics at the individual unit level so that it can have huge numbers of units.
For an example, Shogun 2: Total War (which I've never gotten around to playing, and didn't even realize I own) takes up 23.0 gigs on my hard drive. Breaking down the largest space users, you have:
Movies: 5.82 GB
Character Models: 4.7 GB
Terrain model: 3.46 GB
Data (not sure what this is): 2.39 GB
Sound: 2.05 GB
Ignoring the data element, that comes to 16.0 GB, all of which is devoted to giving the player a good audiovisual experience. To put it another way, the game has only
7 gigs devoted to gameplay elements such as the physics and graphics engines, in game help, unit data, etc. The only way to decrease the footprint of modern games is to make them uglier.