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Comment by merb | Hacker News Reader

> Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.

no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not. I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes. how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?

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With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets.

But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.

Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.

From what I've gathered this has as much to do with for the Xbox One and PS4 the discs are only "installers" these days (and sometimes worse, just "activation tokens"), and for various reasons both the Xbox One and the PS4 have some very interesting heuristics of what they bother to pull from the disc versus what they just grab from the internet. The Blu-Ray discs on those consoles are slower than people tend to think they are and I get the impression a lot of times the consoles this generation themselves just think it is faster to fetch everything from the internet than to bother trying to pull it from the drive.

these 40gb patches happen because they had to put assets in multiple times in such a way as to cause less seeking time on the internal hard drive. They're too slow this gen to be able to do this all without problems. So games would put various re-used assets in multiple places in the game's file bundles so that when you're in section A of the game it can access that file with all the other files of section A. And likewise it puts a duplicate in section B so that when you're in section B it doesn't have to seek to section A's files to find it, which would be slower.

It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.

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