While the Color of Madness update was great, it severely increased the specs needed to run DD, resulting in white boxes for lots of players even without mods, and with an incredibly small mod limit before the game outright crashes. At this point, most players can't even use a couple dozen mods before running into crashes. Some people even get white boxes with no mods enabled, when the game worked fine before the CoM update. The problem is threefold:

1. The game fails to load a number of assets, resulting in white boxes replacing sprites.

2. The mod list "breaks" when you have too many mods, forcing you to unsubscribe from them to remove them.

3. Most importantly, if your combined modlist filesize is too big, the game just stops loading partway through, resulting in partially-loaded, damaged mods that break the game. This problem is so bad that running more than one large mod, such as Falconer or Dimensional Havoc, is enough for most peoples' games to break.

If this game isn't optimized, upcoming mods like Sunken City or Moonlit Dungeon will be dead on arrival, single-handedly surpassing the mod limit, and the game will die off completely. Additionally, a portion of the playerbase will have white boxes with or without mods. Fixing the optimization issues will allow this game to live on for many years beyond the end of official support.