Helldivers 2 has been in a terrible state as of late, although developer Arrowhead Game Studios is pausing new content to double down on major performance fixes. With “many more months” of patches in the works to improve performance and balancing—as well as eliminate bugs—the studio has a lot of work ahead of them.
However, one of the more pressing matters for Helldivers 2 is specifically the state of its PC version. At the time of writing, the PC version is more than three times the size of the game’s Xbox Series and PS5 counterparts, coming in at a whopping 150GB.
Recently, Arrowhead explained that it was looking into the issue, but the massive file size can only truly be fixed by abandoning the game’s support for physical Hard Disk Drive users. In the current game, Arrowhead duplicates a large number of files to make it easier for HDDs to find and load specific assets, leading to the game’s massive file size.
Speaking to fans on the game’s Discord, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Shams Jorjani explained that the team is looking into two options: either splitting the game into a HDD and an SSD build for PC players to choose between, or abandon Hard Drive users altogether.
“Just wondering if there’s any plans for an SSD branch on PC since it’s still 100GB bigger than consoles?” one fan asked the CEO in the game’s official Discord server last week. “That’s the thing we’re exploring,” Jorjani responded.
Another fan asked, “have you guys studying the possibility of dropping HDD support completely? I know [it] is hard but I believe people will understand.” The Arrowhead CEO succinctly replied: “Yes. Being looked into.”
At the time of writing, the price of an SSD isn’t too much compared to the price of a physical hard disk drive. Additionally, players who do have the game installed on an SSD are having a lot more space taken up by the game than if the game was optimised for the faster storage tech.
Since fans discovered exactly why Helldivers 2 takes up so much space on PC, there has been large support for the game to leave HDDs behind and focus entirely on supporting SATA SSDs and M.2 drives. Additionally, there has been very little talk from players who still use a physical mechanical hard drive to run the game.
With the game’s file size being such a huge issue for the game’s PC playerbase—which is around half of the game’s entire playerbase—it seems that the move to an SSD-only branch is the obvious move forward. However, as with anything, time will tell.
