It was for HDDs, literally helping you people who refuse to advance. It was progress in the sense that it allowed you to play on your outdated system. They could have just told you to fuck off from the get go.

If you're still using HDD for games in 2025 then what the fuck are you even playing at? Even the consoles abandoned that.

It's because it has mmo-like mechanics. They said it's because they don't want someone to cheat and ruin things like global orders to free a planet. Ex: someone can cheat and clear missions *wayyy* faster and overly contribute to if a planet tbat the entire community is working towards liberating from the filthy Terminids.

The fact that they were using 5-6x more space than required in the first place is pretty infuriating.

Great for steam deck users

No the issue isn't with the user having a 400GB drive. The issue is the devs chose to leave 131GB of unnecessary duplication in the game artifacts when published. That is a fundamental problem with software in general but games especially. Blaming the customer for expecting to have a decent product is laughably misplaced. Part of software being a decent product is it being optimized. This was an absolute failure and they should really be putting out an apology instead of patting themselves on the back. It's great the game is so much smaller now but it should have been this new size at launch. Certainly not 131GB bigger than it needed to be.

Asset swap mods are fine

Cool, wanna go through the list of modern games and see their file sizes? COD is somewhere around 300GB. Anything AAA is usually 80-100gb. If all you have is a system capable of playing indie games, don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby. A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask. If you can't do that, fine. But don't drag the rest of us down with you.

Bruh, this is a crazy, defensive rant. You're defending multi-million dollar companies who are bad at their jobs and blaming the consumer who is getting poorer and poorer every year. Using COD as an example for normal, a famously repetitive franchise game whose developer is corpo as hell is not a good look. How many people at that studio are getting paid a good wage even relative to industry standard and not suffering burnout and other bad practices. Helldiver's just proved that A) you can have something like 6x bloat for no reason which they themselves say will hardly impact HDDs B) this is largely technical incompetence as they vetted their initial assumptions and found them flawed. This isn't about them supporting HDD's, they said they'll barely be impacted. This is about a developer not knowing what they need to do to make a successful game and slowly figuring out what is unnecessary. If COD cared, they could lower it too.

Nah, it's just not 1995 anymore. I was around for those times bro. I know what computer tech used to be. I know what it is now. I've seen the progression. And yes, if you only have a 500GB hard drive today, you're the equivalent of someone trying use floppy disks. Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg. Sorry you're trying to game in modern times with an Atari, but again, that's a you problem. Maybe get a job?

> don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby > A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask This take is very telling of the privileged economic background you come from. Totally out of touch with the reality most of your fellow humans live in. I’ll be very surprised if you aren’t some white American nepo-baby

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?'

AFAIK basically the only thing they care about is that you don't cheat in premium currency or ruin other players experiences, they're fine with local mods

They need 15% of that space. It isn't about the drives or if people can afford a certain size SSD (although that matters more than you are admitting). It's about asking better of people and companies responsible for destroying over a decade of hardware advancement due to bad optimization (to save money), overly-abstracted frameworks (to save money), and improper handling of assets (to save money). They made a mistake in not prioritizing this, they fixed it and admitted there was a problem. That's good. What isn't good is people polishing their knobs as if the devs did this out of the goodness of their heart. They didn't, they were losing players because people were speaking with time and money. Just like you wanted. Just like people in this thread are doing. But glancing through your other replies I'll just stop here. My your drive space remain vast, and your tolerance for badly-optimized software remain stronger than mine.

There are various coop games that no longer get played by me and my friends, entirely because of their install size. Someone uninstalls to free up space, and then because it would take longer than our gaming nights to download, never gets played again unless one of us is instant that they download it ahead of time. We just play something else.

To be fair that's still an issue of out dated rigs. It's an understandable problem, but it is a "you" problem more then anything. Companies could do a lot more to compress files and reduce file size but then you just move the problem from storage space to out dated CPUs with long load times and poor performance. Really having less then 3-4 terabytes at this point is baffling.

Realistically a single drive should be 3-4 terabytes in 2025... A 4 terabyte sata is like 200-230 bucks for a middling drive on Amazon right now. Having 8 terabytes of storage is not hard to have. It's not like you can't put more storage in your PC. Seriously I would question anyone with less then even just 5 terabytes.

Don't need to be a racist piece of shit and attack people mate. Even if we throw back and look to older tech that would be available in a poor African country you can find 5+ terabytes of storage for less than 50 bucks USD with shipping to Africa. Your looking at 7200 rpm drives but storage space is *not* expensive even in the poorest country as long as you don't demand the cutting edge. Load times will be a problem but if your poor you can still easily find second hand storage in large quantities for cheap. Iv been poor as fucking dirt. It sucks but as the saying goes, you can be poor or stupid. You shouldn't be both. And as long as you're smart about it, you can have pretty decently nice things for really really cheap. It's just not going to be new and it's going to be real hard to find but it's doable. So again, that take isn't remotely privileged. It's poorly stated sure, but the point being made is accurate. Your take on the other hand is fucking disgusting and you should sit down and shut up.

Programmers need to respect other people's hardware. A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago. My data is stored on a mirrored RAID, and backed up on two alternating offsite drives. For every TB of space I use, I buy 4. I do not consider this negotiable. I don't back up game installs, but by point remains valid. 90% of hardware advances gets pissed away by bloated shitcode. I see it every day.

filthy SSD gamer! so pathetic. real gamers play from ramdisks! what wooden pc are you even playing with less than 200 GB RAM?