Have you ever noticed that Helldivers 2 takes up a lot more room on PC than it does on either Xbox Series X|S or PlayStation 5? At 150GB, the game is roughly three times bigger on PC than on consoles. According to Arrowhead game studio deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong, the reason why is that Helldivers 2 is still catering to a small segment of PC users.
In a lengthy post on Steam, Armstrong wrote that Helldivers 2’s install footprint is so large because most of it is duplicated for the benefit of players who still use mechanical hard disk drives. It’s an antiquated process that features duplicate data grouped close together in order to reduce loading times. Armstrong notes that the duplication is not necessary for players who have long since upgraded to solid state drives, but Arrowhead has had difficulty determining how many players remain on mechanical HDDs.
“How many Helldivers 2 players are still using mechanical HDD? The truth is that we don’t currently know,” Armstrong wrote. “Even the Steam user surveys are unable to give us data on mechanical HDD use in the overall gamer population. Our best estimates put it at around 12% of all PC gamers, but the data is very unreliable and relies on a lot of extrapolations. Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication. Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.”
Armstrong laid out some potential solutions and noted that the next update will make some progress towards shrinking the file size. However, he warns that players may not notice the difference “because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains.” For a medium-term solution, Arrowhead plans to bundle common assets together rather than featuring so many duplicate files. The downside is that it will make the game slightly slower for mechanical HDD users, but he hopes to keep the load times to “less than 30 seconds.”
Going forward, Arrowhead will also work to improve its engine and improve compression techniques that reduce the need for duplication. However, Armstrong added that the studio doesn’t know yet if the impact on load times will make this an infeasible solution.
Arrowhead Game Studio CEO Shams Jorjani recently stated that the team’s goal for Helldivers 2 is to keep it going forever, rather than moving on to Helldivers 3. The studio also released a patch that tackled cave crashes and audio bugs. More recently, Arrowhead acknowledged a long list of problems to address, including “issues including performance drops, stability hiccups, freezes, and the annoying audio bugs.” An update is planned for later this month, but many of those issues may take more time to fix.
