Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full.
I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that.
I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
I hate that companies have no concept of storage optimization anymore - sure, higher-res textures take up more space, but there’s literally no excuse for Battlefield 1 taking up 70GB of my PS4 storage. Plus the PS4 does weird stuff with updates, so I need to leave ~100GB of my 2TB drive free at any time so that it can figure out what to do with those massive update files before deleting the unneeded files...
I have found that forcing the PS4 to use CloudFlare’s DNS speeds up downloads by an order of magnitude, though, which is nice - updates that used to take an hour or more now downloads in <10 minutes.
I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that.
I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.