Oh, and on the topic of stupid game design, how stupid is this...

First, there is obviously the fact that the matchmaker doesnt do shit, so you get horribly lobsided teams. Plus there is no accounting for 6 friends playing together vs a bunch of soloists... but thats common to all dude-bro games.

What kills me is...

You jump in to the campaign at level 1, you get put in the Militia side. You complete that campagin, then start the other side of the conflict.

This means by default, all level 1s are ALWAYS on one side of the battle.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Uhm... 28GB are roughly 44 hours of non-stop CD-quality audio. I find that hard to believe.

Glad to see im not the only one who think this is insane.

Laziness of the PC porting team, nothing more, nothing less...

It's interesting. I know our game's (Angry Birds Go!) load times at boot are because of sound decompression. I think it's nice that they've considered lower spec PCs, but these days dual-core PCs are rare amongst gamers. If anyone was serious about gaming I'd imagine they'd have upgraded to at least quad a long time ago.

So true.

Yes, if that's the reason its asinine. Decoding a few ogg or mp3 files isn't going to be that big a burden on the CPU. And even if it were, there's no reason it couldn't be done during loading.

A much more likely reason, methinks, is that the Xbox One has co-processors which can stream and route data without CPU intervention, and also has co-processors to decompress popular compressed formats including, for sure, JPEG and LZW, and probably mp3 as well. My guess would be that the Xbox One version of the software takes advantage of this to stream compressed audio directly to the mixer, decompressing it at the same time, and that they didn't take the time to really change how this works to be more suitable for the PC -- it sounds like the did the minimum work of creating a kind of shim to do the streaming, and that the PC, of course, doesn't have hardware to decompress it. That would mean they couldn't decompress the audio during loading screens, because its too built into the game, and I suppose if they would be decompressing a lot of audio streams, and their min-spec processor represented significantly-higher potential install base by keeping it just that much lower, then you could make a business case for such a decision -- but it really is just laziness that they didn't consider PC audio from the ground up to begin with.

What about sound cards? Aren't they hardware to decode sound? (Edit: Thinking about it, It's true that they don't do the decoding part in hardware tho)

Plus, i have an old dual core athlon 5000+, and listening to mp3 while playing a game dosn't matter at all, that take like 2-3% of my cpu max...

This audio is 7.1 uncompressed and I believe >44khz ( God knows why ). That is many times larger than CD audio

I don't see 7.1 mentioned in the article. Aren't those surround effects calculated in the 3d sound engine from mono samples?

Also anything higher than 44khz doesn't really make any sense unless you are doing some extreme pitch bending.

Are you sure? I though cd audio quality was 44.1 khz

This audio is 7.1 uncompressed and I believe >44khz ( God knows why ). That is many times larger than CD audio

I don't see 7.1 mentioned in the article. Aren't those surround effects calculated in the 3d sound engine from mono samples?
Also anything higher than 44khz doesn't really make any sense unless you are doing some extreme pitch bending.