Seems it’s a good day to be a Helldivers 2 player: in addition to the buff-happy Into the Unjust 5.0.0 patch that launched earlier, developers Arrowhead have shared an update on their efforts to shave down the co-op shooter’s mammoth install size. And it’s not so much a shaving as a fully fuelled chainsawing, high vis vests be damned. As the Steam post explains, there’s now a beta build, available to try, that cuts the 154GB game down to 23GB – a 131GB (!!!) reduction. That’s like surgically removing an entire Black Myth: Wukong that was growing out of its back.
There’s more good news for owners of mechanical HDDs, the aged technology of which – versus new, cool, handsome SSDs – was lightly blamed in the previous dev blog for the bloat that Helldivers 2 had developed. In short, the fear was that by removing duplicated assets, assumed to be vital in keeping the game playable on slow-loading hard drives, Arrowhead’s measures would render older and lower-spec PCs unable to make the dive. This, so says the new blog, turned out to be a miscalculation, with HDD users only expected to endure a few more seconds of loading screens. Not, it seems, an effective loss of support.
“I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass,” the post reads. “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. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
“Now things are different. We have real measurements specific to our game instead of industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical HDD was around 11% during the last week (seems our estimates were not so bad after all). We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.”
So the forest of identical trees wasn’t at fault after all. Sounds like everyone, myself included, owes those bark textures an apology.
It’s not a given though, that the lightweight 23GB build will arrive for all players as-is. A beta is a beta, which potentially means bugs, crashes, or indeed, longer load times than Arrowhead’s calculations predict. Even so, you can test it for yourself right now – opting in is just a matter of opening Helldivers 2’s Properties menu in Steam, navigating to the Betas tab, whacking “prod_slim” (without the quotes) in the Private Betas field, and selecting the slim build from the dropdown menu. To opt out, use the same menu to select “None”, assuming you haven’t filled the last remaining 131GB of drive space up with high-resolution photos of redwoods in the meantime.
