There is no greater source of tepid rage than when I see a game, I buy it, I proceed to download it, and it tells me it needs to take up one billion gigabytes of my hard drive space (NB: one billion is an exaggeration). It fills every corner of my being with a potent darkness, and I would like it to stop. This is a feeling many had with Helldivers and its ludicrously large 154GB install size, leading to a test build of the game to be released by Arrowhead last year knocking it way down to only 23GB in size. And now, after some testing, this build will be available to everyone!
“After extensive testing of our ‘slim’ build, weeks of your input and stress testing including a great influx of new and returning players in the ‘Machinery of Oppression’ major update, we are confident that players are having a great experience playing HELLDIVERS 2 on the smaller build,” reads a Steam post from Arrowhead. “As a result we will be removing the ‘large’ build from Steam inline with our next patch – 17th March 2026.” Huzzah!
The original reason as to why Helldiver 2 was so large on PC was so that it would specifically work better on Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). In the soon to be outdated build, a lot of the data in the game was actually duplicated, which Arrowhead previously explained is a commonly used technique that helps games run on older storage media. HHDs have a read head that has to physically move to read their internal disks, meaning the seek time is longer, whereas something like an SSD is free of such limitations. But Arrowhead still wanted the game to be playable for everyone, hence the duplication technique.
Except now they’ve done some wizardry and even those on HDDs can play the game without all that chaff! Lovely stuff, and now you’ll have room for hundreds more JPEGs or whatever it is you do when you’re not playing games.
