Arrowhead probably deserves more love for breaking the norm but I think it's overshadowed by people finding out for the first time the reason HDDs are so common in gaming setups is companies have been blindly shaving a few seconds off HDD load time off at the cost of 7x the disk space.

If it had been more well known this was the cause of game bloat before then this probably would have been better received. Still, Arrowhead deserves more credit both for testing and breaking the norm as well as making it a popular topic.

It would be one thing if it was a 20% increase in space usage, or if the whole game was smaller to start with, or if they had actually checked to see how much it assisted HDD users.

But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?

It's kind of exemplary of HD2's technical state in general - which is a mix of poor performance and bugs. There was a period where almost every other mission became impossible to complete because it was bugged.

The negativity is frustration boiling over from years of a bad technical state for the game.

I do appreciate them making the right choice now though, of course.

This is a mischaracterization of the optimization. This isn't a standard optimization that games apply everywhere. It's an optimization for spinning disks that some games apply sometimes. They're expected to measure if the benefits are worth the cost. (To be clear, bundling assets is standard. Duplicating at this level is not.)

This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:

1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game. Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.

2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.

I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.

It's because shitting on game devs is the trendy thing these days, even among more technically inclined crowds unfortunately. It seems like there's a general unwillingness to accept that game development is hard and you can't just wave the magic "optimize" wand at everything when your large project is also a world of edge cases. But it seems like it should be that simple according to all the armchair game devs on the internet.

At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.

When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.

People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.

The negativity comes from the zero effort they put into this prior to launch. Forcing people to download gigs of data that was unnecessary.

Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used but its still up to the developers to make sure their assets are reusable as to cut down on size.

This is why Star Citizen has been in development for 15 years. They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.

The anger here is real. The anger here is justified. I'm sick of having to download 100gb+ simply because a studio is too lazy and just packed up everything they made into a bundle.

I feel like negativity has become Hacker News's bread and butter.

Many players perceive Arrowhead as a pretty incompetent and untrustworthy developer. Helldivers has suffered numerous issues with both performance and balancing. The bugs constantly introduced into the game (not the fun kind you get to shoot with a gun) have eroded a lot of trust and good will towards the company and point towards a largely non-existent QA process.

I won’t state my own personal views here, but for those that share the above perspective, there is little benefit of the doubt they’ll extend towards Arrowhead.

Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."

Many would consider this a bare minimum rather than something worthy of praise.

The negativity wasn't created in a vacuum. ArrowHead has a long track record of technical mishaps and a proven history of erasing all evidence about those issues, without ever trying to acknowledge them. Reddits, Discord and YouTube comment section are heavily moderated. I suspect there's might be a 3rd party involved in this, which doesn't forward any technical issues, if the complaint involves any sign of frustration. Even the relation with their so called "Propaganda Commanders" (official moniker for their youtube partner channels) has been significantly strained in two cases, for trivialities.

It took Sony's intervention to actually pull back the game into playable state once - resulting in the so called 60 day patch.

Somehow random modders were able to fix some of the most egregiously ignored issues (like an enemy type making no sound) quickly and effectively. ArrowHead ignored, then denied, then used the "gamers bad" tactic, banned people pointing it out. After long time, finally fixing it and trying to bury it in the patch notes too.

They also have been caught straight up lying about changes, most recent one was: "Apparently we didn't touch the Coyote", where they simply buffed enemies resistance to fire, effectively nerfing the gun.