If you're playing Helldivers 2 regularly on PC, you've certainly noticed the size of the game's footprint on your hard drive: a whopping 150GB. That's a whole lot bigger than the game is on console, and developer Arrowhead knows it's frustrating to have such a massive chunk of your storage space eaten up by a single game. The studio has addressed the issue multiple times in recent months, and game director Mikael Eriksson wants you to know it's still a priority for the dev team.
"PC file size is unacceptably large right now," Eriksson says in a new official dev interview. He references a recent blog post from the studio's deputy technical director in explaining the problem – in short, the game still supports mechanical hard drives in addition to solid state drives, which means that many data files are duplicated to speed up load times for HDD users. If you look at the game's file size on consoles, where SSDs are now standard, you can see how this duplication adds up.
"There's some games that don't support this for this very reason, because you have to rely on duplicating files and so forth. So we're exploring options. We're looking into if we can have different patches for players who have mechanical hard drives and players who installed it on SSDs. If so, we could theoretically slice the size in half."
Eriksson says players need to take this idea with "a little pinch of salt," because Arrowhead is still working on the exact solution. "But there's real options here to do quite big improvements in just reducing PC install size, and I'm sure that we'll get back with more information the next time we do one of these. But at least I want everyone to know that we're looking into it. And I agree that it's a little bit on the side of unacceptably large right now."
