The new system has 3 main advantages:
1) Whilst this update will take a while to load, It will make all future updates much faster to download, up to 10x faster. Before if we updated a model the game redownloaded the entire model pack, now it just grabs the changed ones. You won't really see this improvement until our next update though, because for this update your system has to get all the models in the new incremental format.
2) For non-essential files the game will now let you login and start playing even whilst they are still downloading! For instance you can login before all the models have arrived, and if the game needs one it will just quickly fetch it as necessary. This means new players coming into the game can get started much quicker. However if you prefer everything to be 100% ready before login, then just wait for the "extra files" counter on the title-screen to reach 100% before logging in.
3) The game now prefetches maps & music whilst you are playing, so when entering a new area for the first time there will be less of a delay for the map to load, and the music to start. Again you won't really see the benefit of this straight away because currently your computer will be missing quite a lot of files, but once you have fully downloaded the current update you should experience much shorter delays in the future
I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Well that's all good, but what we really want is content updates." Don't worry we have a new quest just around the corner, which we will release as soon as we are confident the new update system is running smoothly for everyone. There's a lot of new code here, so we just want to be certain it's working properly first.
Thanks
Andrew