Comment by mrguyorama

They claim they were following industry standard recommendation.

Or, you know, they just didn't really understand industry recommendations or what they were doing.

"Turns out our game actually spends most of its loading time generating terrain on the CPU" is not something you accidentally discover, and should have been known before they even thought about optimizing the game's loading time, since optimizing without knowing your own stats is not optimizing, and they wrote the code that loads the game!

Keep in mind this is the same team that accidentally caused instantly respawning patrols in an update about "Balancing how often enemy patrols spawn", the same group that couldn't make a rocket launcher lock on for months while blaming "Raycasts are hard", and released a mech that would shoot itself if you turned wrong, and spent the early days insisting that "The game is supposed to be hard" as players struggled with enemy armor calculations that would punish you for not shooting around enemy armor because it was calculating the position of that armor incorrectly, and tons of other outright broken functionality that have made it hard to play the game at times.

Not only do Arrowhead have kind of a long history of technical mediocrity (Magicka was pretty crashy on release, and has weird code even after all the bugfixes), but they also demonstrably do not test their stuff very well, and regularly release patches that have obvious broken things that you run into seconds into starting play, or even have outright regressions suggesting an inability to do version control.

"We didn't test whether our game was even slow to load on HDD in the first place before forcing the entire world to download and store 5x the data" is incompetence.

None of this gets into the utterly absurd gameplay decisions they have made, or the time they spent insulting players for wanting a game they spent $60 on to be fun and working.