Helldivers 2 will be 131 GB or 85% smaller, with only one drawback

The very high storage requirements of many modern games are becoming an increasingly significant obstacle. SSDs have hardly become any cheaper in recent years, and downloading several hundred gigabytes of data can take days on a slow internet connection. This made it all the more annoying that Helldivers 2 takes up 154 GB of storage on PC, even though the PlayStation 5 version only takes up 36 GB.

Arrowhead Game Studios has now explained on Steam what causes this enormous difference. According to them, the game files contain multiple duplicates of many assets, which serve to reduce loading times when the game is installed on a hard drive. This is because the duplicates mean that the hard drive's read head does not have to move as far to read the fragmented data, which, according to the developers, could lead to ten times longer loading times in a worst-case scenario. In practice, however, the differences are much smaller than expected, as loading times without duplicated data are said to be only a few seconds longer. For users with an SSD, the elimination of duplicates makes no difference.

The developers point out that the difference in loading times can be much greater for other games, depending on how many assets need to be loaded at the same time. Since only 11% of all Helldivers 2 players start the game from an HDD instead of an SSD, according to Arrowhead, the developers have now decided to remove the hard drive duplicates, reducing the game's installation size from 154 GB to just 23 GB. This "slim" version of Helldivers 2 is currently in beta testing, but in the future, this version will be automatically installed for all players.