*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!*
In the case of Mario it’s a smart way of handling the limited data available, its not a duplicate texture like Helldivers, its the same cloud copy pasted just with a different color.
From what I understand Helldivers had the same files duplicated multiple times so that HDD could find them easily (somehow)
Ahh yes, the same approach I have to script development: multiple files, in different places, for different platforms, all with the same code!