Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios has finally explained why the third-person shooter's file size is so massive on PC, but unfortunately, there's no easy fix to rectify it.
Complaints about Helldivers 2's PC file size have been growing lately – an update last month pushed it above 140GB, making it around triple the size of the same game on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Although Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani quickly confirmed that "we have escalated the priority of this," there was no word on when it was set to be addressed.
And, well, there still isn't. In the first of a series of blogs from the studio to discuss "the technical health of the game and some of the technical challenges we’re working through," Helldivers 2's deputy technical director confirms that – as players previously suspected – the inflated, "around 150 GB" file size is a result of data duplication to "optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and optical discs like DVDs."
So, should Helldivers 2 continue to be optimized for HDDs? The dev calls this "the six-million-dollar question," explaining: " On the one hand, they are a part of our minimum spec PC requirements. On the other hand – how many Helldivers 2 players are still using mechanical HDDs? The truth is that we don’t currently know."
The team estimates that "around 12% of all PC gamers" use mechanical HDDs, but unless that can be more accurately determined, "it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication." They add: "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."
They continue: "We cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower, and we do not feel that this is acceptable." Even so, some compromises can be made. Arrowhead has "made some small gains in the next update by sweeping our systems for unused assets and obvious problems," which the dev admits will likely not be noticeable, but still help keep the file size from growing.
"Beyond the next update, we're exploring taking some of the worst offenders in terms of duplication and de-duplicating them by putting them in 'very common assets' bundles which will always be loaded under set conditions (eg, specific faction/biome)," they continue. "This does mean that loading times will get a bit worse for players using mechanical HDDs – it is unfortunate but unavoidable. Our early testing shows we should be able to keep this in the range of 'less than 30 seconds' rather than 'several minutes.'"
In the even longer term, Arrowhead is planning engine improvements to "ensure we never waste RAM loading common data that isn’t needed," while further work is "a bigger, riskier, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to the game data and potentially replicate some of the de-duplication we do on consoles. We don't yet know if the impacts to load times could make these approaches infeasible." Arrowhead also doesn't fancy the idea of making the highest-resolution textures an optional download.
Summing things up, the dev says, "We're taking your concerns very seriously, but there are no easy solutions. Until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we're all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time." However, Arrowhead is "very carefully weighing up the costs and tradeoffs of the options we have, and we'll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon."
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