I haven't read the entire thread, but when I first saw reports of this, what caught my eye was the '2-16GB of RAM' part. Doesn't a program have to be 64-bit in order to use more than 2GB of RAM? Maybe this means the game is really taking advantage of 64-bit to its fullest, and thus, if you have that much RAM (16GB of DDR3 is only ~$100 these days), then loading times and such would be greatly reduced, if not removed almost entirely.
Also, since Mass Effect 2, and especially after all of the DLC it had gotten, I started thinking that while its obvious that consoles are really being choked by the limitations of DVD (it's a fact the PS3 fan base mention often as a positive when compared to the Xbox 360), it wasn't ever that much of a big deal on PC, because not only are PC games are mainly first installed, but also because of the popularity of Steam. Consoles only now have large enough hard drives stock to take advantage of direct-download services for full games, and that's something we'll see a lot more often next gen for sure. But even though direct-download is the obvious champion on the PC, people still buy games on disc, and thus the PC must also move to Blu Ray.
I mean, how many DVDs is this game going to be? I was expecting a BD release of a "Mass Effect 2: Game of the Year Edition" (it hits around 20-25GB all told I believe) for PC, but that didn't happen. If this game requires 35GB of HDD space, giving the installer size the benefit of the doubt of a 1.5:1 compression ratio, that's still gotta be like 4 or more DVDs. Who the hell would be cool with that, even if they want to buy PC games on disc still? And I know there's gotta be a lot of people who do so, not everyone has phat pipes connected right to their machines.
