Title pretty much says it.
On launch (on any variation of the startup settlings) the window opens to a black screen with the pointer and stays there. No music. Also the window does not appear to crash but just sirs there.
the very first loading screen is a very long wait. some people have reported 10 minute waits. There is apparently some unpacking going on in the background
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I haven’t measured how much data the initial load accessed but my SSD shows a solid 550 MBs and it loaded for quite a while. A hard drive could probably take quite a while. Probably just not optimized yet.
Ok, might as well not be lazy 
It appears to read 12.8 GB of data from the time of clicking the launcher to seeing the main screen. I’m showing about 140,000 read requests.
With a main stream hard drive the best case scenario is usually 140 MBs, which comes out to 1.5 minutes. A fragmented hard drive (not SSD) can drop as low as 1 to 5 MBs.
Method: SysInternal’s procmon limited to phoenix point.
Edit: as per another thread the load skips around parts of files and between files a lot, which HDDs would have a hard time with.
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Maybe game is checking files integrity at launch?
I think you are right. It appears to load the data but not hold onto it. It’s either doing an integrity check or it might be loading the files as a kind of hack to force the files into the Windows file cache to make the game faster later.
It would be an odd integrity check since it loads parts of large files, but they could be checking important indexes vs data or something.
My guess would be just a workaround during development or something.
The game pre-loads most game assets (except individual maps) on initial load to reduce in-game loading times.
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Thanks UnstableVoltage!
Edit: Removed blabbering post, no point in spitballing code or design decisions I don’t know anything about.