*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!*
The problem I see with it is that we’ve gone the full circle.
First games loaded slow on HDDs, but SSDs solved it.
Then, seeing how SSDs are faster, game developers decided they could fit more read/write operations.
Now games load slow on SSDs.
Nah, in this case the circle is the devs wanting to optimize for HDDs. Which made the game bigger with duplicated files. Which forced players to install the game in HDDs since they lacked space on SSD.
Having the choice for both will offer the best for each case.
Having both options available would be pretty nice