In the nick of time, Helldivers 2 rolls out a "slim version" shrinking file sizes by a whopping 85% on PC: "It's a low-risk way to save ~131GB of space on your drive"

Sweet liberty, the Helldivers 2 PC file size is finally getting a substantial reduction after months of bloating and taking up chunks of people's hard drives. In a new update, Arrowhead Game Studios has shaved around 85% of the overall memory requirement down, creating a "slim version."

The numbers are as follows: the files for Helldivers 2 used to amount to around 154GB, but now they stand at a grand total of around 23GB. That's a massive difference, and one that's been long overdue in the eyes of players who've had to dedicate an increasingly large partition of their space to the multiplayer shooter.

This also means load times are becoming reduced, something the devs actually feared would get worse instead of better. "I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used," the tech blog states.

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Here's a small bit of bad news: this patch isn't going to all players just yet. A public technical beta is going right now, and you can sign-up if you fancy being one of the first to see what these changes do to the game and help Arrowhead make any changes necessary.

"You will still be able to matchmake and play with all other players," the notes state. "You can also opt-out at any time if you experience issues. It's a low-risk way to save ~131GB of space on your drive and help us extend our testing to real-life conditions."

Should all go well, the "slim version" of Helldivers 2 will become the norm and everyone can enjoy giving a reasonable slice of their valuable memory to democracy. "Given the very minor differences in loading times between the two versions, there is no justification for us to keep supporting the legacy version long term," the blog post reads.

"Maintaining the legacy version alongside the slim version would only add extra burden to our developers, build machines, QA teams and release processes. Assuming all goes smoothly, the legacy version will be discontinued some time next year."

Helldivers 2 patch brings balance changes and bug fixes, but fans are devastated that "Factory Striders will no longer be launched to sky erratically" now: "Worst change ever."