Helldivers 2 is about to get much, much smaller on PC, as Arrowhead (with some help from PlayStation’s Nixxes) have worked hard to squish the game’s install down by a staggering 85%! That’s huge news for PC players… and those that just have the game installed, but haven’t actually played it in a while.
Available now as a beta update, this reduces the PC installation size from ~154GB to just ~23GB, a completely ridiculous reduction in size. You’ll still be on the same build of the game, just without taking up so much space. Neat!
How is this possible? Well, in a blog post recently, Arrowhead addressed the issue of the game’s installation on PC and how much bigger it was than the PS5 version of the game. The reason for the difference was that, while the PS5 is guaranteed to have an SSD, Arrowhead thought that they needed to duplicate files to keep loading times down for PC gamer playing from a traditional mechanical HDD. After the reduction in size, Arrowhead believe that mission loading times for HDD players will be increased by just a few seconds in the worst cases.
All of this is because Arrowhead had relied on industry data for this assumption on data duplication – a practice that has been common to aid in random read times for any kind of spinning disc media. After exploring this in tandem with Nixxes and gathering real data specific to this game (such as that only 11% of players were playing from HDD), they discovered that the majority of loading times are actually from level generation as opposed to asset loading, meaning they could safely de-duplicate game assets, as asset loading happens in parallel.
While testing has been very positive internally, Arrowhead is still being cautious and hosting this as a beta alongside the main version, before reversing the roles and putting the huge version of Helldivers 2 as a legacy version to help with troubleshooting. However, given the minor differences, they won’t maintain this forever.
Source: Steam
