TL;DR, although one would have expected lower quality textures and other assets,they're actually achieving this by deduplicating data which was originally duplicated to reduce loading times. They've found a way to deduplicate without affecting loading times. (Lossless compression might be involved too -- post is vague.) They'll make this the new default version of the game after ironing out the bugs.

154 GB to 23 GB

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%).

Jesus Christ that's a lot of duplicated data.

The install size isn't what bugs me.

It's the CPU bound performance making it run like shit unless you set it to potato graphics. Make it utilize the GPU more.

Will it allow me to run updates that don't take 45-60 minutes to apply even though I have the game installed on an NVME drive?

Literally uninstalled the game because I was tired of waiting forever for updates to apply every few days.

I'm glad to see pcmasterrace be 13 GBs smaller than PS5 [35(?)GBs on PS5].

Anyone know the Xbox install size?

holy shit, this is gonna stay installed on my steam deck now