*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected._
By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*
Yeah, PS5 games are made with the assumption that they'll have access to a 5GB/s drive. It makes sense that they might actually benefit from that. I saw a test of Ratchet and Clank running on a HDD and the main difference was the portals that mask the load times were comically long.
And it's true the difference in price isn't that great any more. Personally I've got an older SATA in my PC and a NVME. I try to install to the faster drive where I can, but since my PC actually has a worse CPU than my Legion Go S, I'm not likely to see a lot of benefit from it. I suppose you've got a better chance of picking up a used SATA drive on the cheap if you really need to save money.
Yeah, very reasonable. I updated my original comment to highlight that I was overstating the problem. Thanks for your comments.