Also - Yeah, no the game is not optimized, they chose to not even pursue that yet. Though eventually it will be something they do.
they have to tackle that right now im pretty sure, otherwise the port to UE5 will be a horrible fiesta.
thats probably what they mean by "cleaning up code and assets etc."
afterwards they ofc have to continue because the port will require work afterwards too and i expect optimization to continue being a topic even post release because thats how most games are nowadays by nature of being more complex than lets say 20 years ago.
but its important that they fix important issues rather quickly, even during beta, for example a memory leak. whilst i have no info about it in detail ofc and cant say how "deep" the issue is rooted in the code or if its a UE4 issue, it is never a good thing to let a memory leak fester for years nonetheless.
i just wonder if the devs dont have an issue with it themselves during work because i for sure run into it quite often and the only fix is to hard shutdown the game and if i see the system memory reaching the ~16gb in time i just reload the map.
rather annoying.