[2022] Why is this game so crazy big

Basically it comes down to what is called bundling. Mechanical drives are really slow at seeking to new sections on the disks so to reduce the load times we basically have to take each "package", let's say a level to simplify it a bit, and take everything within that level such as models, textures, sounds, animations and much much more and create a blob of data that can be read sequentially without having to seek across the physical disks on a mechanical drive to find the file we need. This reduces load times by at least a factor of five for mechanical drives. The downside though is that since the data has to be put sequentially on disk which means that we have to duplicate A LOT of data across all of our packages. There is ways around this and we are exploring our options but that's the explaination.

Even if you have a super fast SSD and don't benefit from the bundling you still have to wait for the person with the slowest drive to load into a mission to have everyone synced.

Not exactly excusibg our file size but that is the reason and we're looking into ways of optimizing disk usage but it will take time

Yes we have a different bundling strategy for darktide which will reduce the disk size considerably. I'm not as involved in that though so I'm not 100% sure exactly where it'll end up compared to V2