The 150 GB of data is probably a necessity for the amount of content in the game, by that I agree. As someone who has been programming alot and know the workings of the PC in some detail I will allow myself to question the SSD requirement though as a pure necessity. And I do find it suspicious that almost every big game being developed have requirements that require the latest in hardware. It is almost as if the game companies was working with hardware producers to force gamers to upgrade their computer as often as possible? Not good for the environment, and not fair to people who can't afford it.
The issue is, the more data that is stored on your block device, the faster it needs to load.
That is the reason swap is slower tahn real RAM - because the speed is slower.
SSD is faster than HDD, so you can reduce the needed amount of preload needed to have a decent amount of fps.
The other option would to load everything when loading the map - which needs massive amounts of RAM - or have smaller maps.
And so far, BG3 does *not* require the latest hardware. SSD is common for quite some time now.
In fact, if BG3 would need the latest hardware, I could not play it at all. Since I am playing on a gaming laptop that is around 2 years old.
And I will (hopefully) also play on the SteamDeck which is also not exactly the newest hardware..
Honestly, when I came back to PC gaming after 15 years of only using console I was surprised how long you could keep your hardware and still play the newest games.
