yer new patch deleted the whole game, now I've got download it all again and it'll take two days, thanks for nothing

get yer head out of you know where

The patch didn't delete the game. It's more than likely that you're seeing the huge size for the patch (a little overboard for being just fixes and optimizations if you ask me but meh) and are mistaking that as the game redownloading. If you're using Galaxy, it temporarily needs double the size of the patch available as free space.

You do not understand the process of an update. If you change 1kb in a 1GB file, you have to re-download the whole 1GB file. So if you look how many fixes the patch brings, you can clearly see why the patch is so big. Kapish now? :)

Technically it _is_ possible to do incremental/diff updates. Binary patching at an offset. However, this is not really recommended. So using a new file is better. Moreover, if they modified textures and stuff, it is likely that the download becomes that big, and then you temporarily need roughly doubled capacity or even more.

Well, back in the days of floppies games were less complex but also had to be polished since there was hardly an infrastructure to distribute possible patches (let aside snail mail and floppies in game mags). Still, ~40+ GiB is a bulky one.

The patch literally requires 384GB free to be installed. The game, once patched to 1.2, is less than 65GB.

It seems to me the way they are "patching" it is by basically extracting giant amounts of data from their compressed files, then they change just what is different, and repack it all.

The question is, is it really necessary to have those huge compressed files in the first place, or could they "cut them up" into multiple smaller archives instead. That way patching may not always need to extract quite as much.

Someone mentioned that is would be easier on your HDD / SSD to just delete the game and redownload it.
Which is bizarre.