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Comment by teamonkey | Hacker News Reader

It was a choice, not an oversight. They actively optimised for HDD users, because they believed that failing to do so could impact load times for both SSD and HDD users. There was no speed penalty in doing so for SSD users, just a disk usage penalty.

Helldivers II was also much smaller at launch than it is now. It was almost certainly a good choice at launch.

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You make a million decisions in the beginning of every project. I'm certain they made the choice to do this "optimization" at an early point (or even incidentally copied the choice over from an earlier project) at a stage where the disk footprint was small (a game being 7GB when it could've been 1GB doesn't exactly set off alarm bells).

Then they just didn't reconsider the choice until, well, now.

Even at the end of development it’s a sensible choice. It’s the default strategy for catering to machines with slow disk access. The risk of some players experiencing slow load times is catastrophic at launch. In absence of solid user data, it’s a fine assumption to make.

The first impression matters is the thing. This was John Carmacks idea on how to sell interlacing to smartphone display makers for VR: the upsell he had was that there's one very important moment when a consumer sees a new phone: they pick it up, open something and flick it and that scroll effect better be a silky smooth 60 FPS or more or there's trouble. (His argument was making that better would be a side effect of what he really wanted).

Call me a dinosaur, but I don't consider a 154Gb download before I can start playing a good first impression.

In fact, I would seriously consider even buying a game that big if I knew beforehand. When a 500Gb SSD is $120 Aussie bucks, that's $37 of storage.

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