Helldivers 2 on PC is a stable model of Sony’s 2024 on-line co-op shooter. Nevertheless, one important flaw of the PC port was its large set up dimension, which took up round 150GB of house and was roughly thrice bigger than the sport on console. Arrowhead promised this may be reduce down. And a brand new replace does simply that.
On December 2, Arrowhead Video games posted a prolonged and detailed put up concerning the studio’s efforts to make the PC port of Helldivers 2 much less bloated. In response to the staff behind the sci-fi shooter, Helldivers 2’s whole set up dimension on PC has been decreased from roughly 154 GB to round 23GB. That’s over 130GB slashed, which is wild. Arrowhead thanked assist studio Nixxes, which apparently helped get the set up dimension all the way down to such a small quantity.
So why was Helldivers 2 on PC so huge in comparison with the console ports? Effectively, as defined on this put up from Arrowhead again in October, Helldivers 2 on PC helps each solid-state drives and older mechanical arduous drives. In an effort to maintain load occasions down and make Helldivers 2 extra optimized, Arrowhead included redundant and repeated information in order that older drives that also spin tiny platters and search out knowledge wouldn’t be slowed down as a lot. This was a standard approach again when video games shipped on optical discs and when consoles didn’t use a lot sooner solid-state drives. That’s additionally why the Xbox and PS5 ports of Helldivers 2 had been smaller in dimension: These units all have SSDs and don’t want redundant, repeated knowledge to optimize loading.
The vast majority of what was faraway from Helldivers 2 in the latest replace on PC had been these redundant information. That may make you are worried about gamers on PC nonetheless utilizing older drives, however Arrowhead says load occasions for gamers on older methods will solely be elevated by a number of seconds, a worthy tradeoff to get the file dimension beneath 25 GB.
For now, this replace is optionally available on PC as Arrowhead continues testing it to ensure nothing was missed. However ultimately, someday subsequent 12 months, this discount in set up dimension shall be necessary because the studio doesn’t wish to assist two totally different variations of the sport on PC.
