As the progress bar hit 89%, Julian leaned back, rubbing his eyes. He imagined the patch as a set of hyper-specific instructions. Go to sector 4,872,221. Read 2048 bytes. Those bytes are now obsolete. Overwrite them with this new sequence. Go to the end of the file. Append 1.3GB of new cutscene data.
Expected: 0x9E37B2A1 Actual: 0x9E37B2A4
The .xdelta file was only 4.2GB. A miracle of binary mathematics. It didn’t contain the new game. It contained only the difference between the old game and the new one. Every changed texture, every modified line of code, every new audio file for the recast protagonist—it was all compressed into a single, deceptively small file.
