*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!*
Holy shit, ok I’ll state it yet again and then I’m done. For the 3rd time, this isn’t about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn’t exist if that is easier because the drives don’t matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue.
This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments…they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed.
Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It’s how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn’t even exist if these weren’t legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn’t have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn’t a problem affecting their bottom line.