On top of spreading democracy across the galaxy, Helldivers 2 players on PC may also soon liberate a hefty amount of storage space. The game’s latest technical public beta on Steam includes a major optimisation update that drastically reduces its installation size, shrinking its installation by a significant 85%!
In a post on the game’s Steam page, Arrowhead Game Studios explained that they’ve been trimming the installation size while continuing to add new content. According to the update, the long-term goal has been to align the PC and console builds, and they now credit partners at Nixxes for helping them reach that target earlier than expected. The developers said they achieved the reduction by fully de-duplicating game data, which cuts the installation from around 154GB to just 23GB.
The team noted that the smaller build should come with only “minimal” effects on loading, estimating any slowdown at just a few seconds – a small price to pay for storage freedom. Previously, the PC version was bloated because the developers duplicated game assets to speed up loading on mechanical HDDs. They estimate that only about 11% of the player base still uses those drives.
Arrowhead added that further testing showed load times are mainly driven by level generation instead of asset loading. As a result, duplicating assets provided little real benefit and placed an unnecessary burden on all players through a much larger installation size.
Eager champions of Super Earth on PC who want to try the updated build can opt into the technical public beta on Steam. The “slim” version will eventually replace the current installation once the developers resolve any remaining issues uncovered during testing.
(Source: Helldivers 2, via Steam)
