*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._
By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*



Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn’t want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can’t even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder’s dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how ‘it’s your fault. Don’t you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don’t you just move to a bigger house? I’m morally superior because I’m complaining about your complaining about something you can’t fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don’t you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can’t afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don’t you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?’