> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch
The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.
Yes.
They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.
Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase?
The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.
Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.