Helldivers 2’s Developers Are Looking Into Ways to Shrink PC Version’s Massive File Size

Arrowhead Game Studios has acknowledged that the file size for Helldivers 2 on PC might be getting too big. In a new video, which you can check out below, game director Mikael Eriksson has discussed the fact that the co-op shooter weighs in at over 140 GB on PC, while the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions come in at less than a third, taking up between 35 and 40 GB of storage.

Eriksson noted that “PC file size is unacceptably large right now,” before going on to refer to one of the studio’s recent blog posts where it had gone into the technical reasons behind the massive file size. The problem comes down to the fact that the PC version of Helldivers 2 has to account for players running the game on hard drives rather than SSDs. Since hard drives tend to have slower read/write speeds in general owing to mechanical parts moving in effort to read or write to and from storage, the only real way developers have to make load times quicker is by duplicating assets.

Console players on modern systems like PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, on the other hand, don’t have to deal with ballooning file sizes since solid-state drives – SSDs – tend to be exponentially faster at retrieving data, which in turn makes data duplication unnecessary.

Eriksson explained that the studio has been exploring it options, which indicates that it wants to avoid locking players that already bought Helldivers 2 out of the game just because the minimum hardware requirements were suddenly changed. He did note that, if the studio can manage to release separate patches for HDD and SSD users, it might even end up cutting file sizes down by a considerable amount.

“There’s some games that don’t support this for this very reason, because you have to rely on duplicating files and so forth,” he explained. “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.”

While Arrowhead Game Studios is yet to reach a final decision on the idea, Eriksson noted that “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.”

Earlier this month, Eriksson had announced that development on additional content for Helldivers 2 was slowing down. Rather, the studio would be focusing its efforts on fixing some of the issues that have been plaguing the co-op shooter, especially since the release of the Into the Unjust update.

Helldivers 2 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review of the most recent release – the Xbox Series X/S version.