Helldivers 2 Devs Explain Why the PC Version Has Such a Gargantuan Installation Size

After a recent update, Helldivers 2’s file size on PC pushed past a whopping 140GB — and as you might expect players aren’t particularly pleased about it. But developer Arrowhead Studios has come out with an explanation about the issue, via an updated posted to Steam.

In a post called Tech Blog #1, Arrowhead says it’s currently working on the issue, and largely pins the blame on outdated, mechanical HDDs. The tech blog will become a regular series of posts where Arrowhead dives into the health of the game, and what it’s working on.

But on the topic of file size, the studio points out the PC size for Helldivers 2 is roughly three times that of the console version. And the heart of the issue seems to be data duplication, with the studio saying

“Much of the data in the PC version of HELLDIVERS 2 is duplicated. The practice of duplicating data to reduce loading times is a game development technique that is primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and optical discs like DVDs. This practice is largely unnecessary for games deployed on Solid State Drives (SSDs) which is why the console versions of HELLDIVERS 2 do not do this. “

Arrowhead points out the main issue with an HDD is “seek time,” as the device stores data on a spinning platter and a literal physical arm with a read head has to move across and read it, leading to a significant performance bottleneck that simply doesn’t exist with SSD.

“Imagine a large game level with various objects — trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process,” adds Arrowhead.

There’s a lot more context the full post dives into, if you’re so inclined. But, of course, the major questions remains what can be done about any of this. The studio hopes to reduce the amount of data duplication, but admits it’s extremely hard to do when they don’t know how many players will be impacted by that. To that end, there are short, medium, and long term solutions Arrowhead is hoping to implement, reducing file size without blowing up load times. Here’s what those are.

Short Term

“We’ve made some small gains in the next update by sweeping our systems for unused assets and obvious problems, but you will not likely notice them because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains. It’s not a game-changer but at least the install size will stop growing.”

Medium Term

“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). 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”. It can also increase the amount of RAM used by the game by loading “common” data that is not always needed. If we don’t make “worst case” RAM usage worse, this should not be noticeable, but it is a risk we are monitoring. By doing some careful measurements and analysis, we should be able to deliver acceptable tradeoffs between RAM usage, loading times and install size.  “

Long Term

Looking further into the future, we plan to make improvements to the engine which will ensure we never waste RAM loading common data that isn’t needed – eliminating one of the drawbacks of the above technique.  

Helldivers 2 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.