Helldivers 2 sheds 130 gigabytes in an unprecedented feat of optimization
As we’ve well documented here, Helldivers 2 is a lot of fun. Helldivers 2 also requires an ungodly amount of space, though, falling victim to the software bloat that plagues a lot of big-budget games. It’s tough, having to weigh the enjoyment I’ll get from a game against the storage space that installing it will take up — and in many cases, that’s by design. If you have fewer games within arm’s reach, publishers figure you’ll probably spend more time playing their 200 gigabyte behemoth.
Helldivers 2‘s next update is a rare reversal of that trend. Like most live-service games, its file size has ballooned as new content has been introduced, to a peak of roughly 160 gigabytes. Now, though, developer Arrowhead is slashing that size by more than 85%, down to a slim and trim 23 gigabytes, with no loss in content, fidelity, or loading time. If it sounds like black magic, that’s because it probably is. Arrowhead explained it as such:
We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!
Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times – seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask – “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. 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.
Almost every large video game has duplicated files, which make loading and gameplay smoother when playing from an HDD at the cost of extreme bloat. As SSDs slowly become the standard for gaming, I’d expect to see more massive cuts like this — finally, we can play more than one game!
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