What.
The fuck.
A dev that actually went through the trouble of compressing their game?
Impressed slow clap.
No. They removed redundant files meant to make the game load faster on HDDs. But tests showed the load times are not that much longer without them. So no need for the gigantic extra files.
Steam reports 22.01GB for me. Had a crash first time mission load after launching but that could've been due to the update itself; the rest of the 3 hour sess I had no issues and my buddy who didn't opt in to the beta also crashed during first mission load
I can also confirm I had issues on my first mission drop in load screen. Me and my friend nearly crashed (froze and hard stuttered for about 5 seconds), and then it started slowly smoothing out. After that, every single drop in load was super smooth, no stutters nor near crashes.
We were both on the slim beta.
My best guess is some kind of first time shader compile for the epic load screen scenery, on top of what is already an intensive process. IIRC, this is when the map is also being generated.
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