"OMG it's a 25GB game patch, must be tons of amazing new content that they're keeping quiet about."
*Could* be, sure, and stealth launches are a thing sometimes, but generally speaking, if it's a big patch for no discernible reason not attached to anything upcoming that's already been announced, the actual reason is probably something very boring and usually non-game-related
(Very) incomplete list of reasons for big patches that are completely unrelated to new content, from personal experience:
- Somebody added an extra field to some header somewhere, so everything that comes after the header moves and has slightly different context, plus content chunking puts chunk boundaries in different places now, so all the compressed data after changes
- We updated compilers and our assets are built using fast math, YOLO
Fabian Giesen
Scott Michaud