Helldivers 2’s massive file size has been a major pain point for the game on PC. In recent months, the game has ballooned in size to a gigantic 150GB as the team continued to support old mechanical hard drives.
In a massive win for fans on PC, who had to download over 100GB of additional content compared to console, Arrowhead Game Studios has miraculously dwarfed the Helldivers 2 install size down to just 23GB.
Shared in a recent Tech Blog update, Arrowhead explained that a partnership with porting studio Nixxes has resulted in the game being dramatically shrunk on PC. The team confirmed that the total file size has been reduced by 85%, cutting 131GB of duplicated data in the game.
“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,” the developer said. “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.”
Arrowhead explained that their internal testing showed that only a very small percentage of PC players were still using mechanical disk drives. However, even with the massive de-duplication, the work done by the team and Nixxes has been completed with only minor extensions in loading times for players still using older storage solutions.
“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),” Arrowhead said. “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.”
Helldivers 2 players on PC can opt into the game’s “slim” version right now.
How to access Helldivers 2 Slim Version
To access the new version, players simply need to enter the correct Steam Beta branch for the game. Follow these steps:
- Right Click Helldivers 2 in your Steam Library
- Click on Properties, Betas
- Enter the code “prod_slim”
- Enable the beta under beta participation
With these steps, you will have entered the new slim version of Helldivers 2. However, it should be noted that this version of the game will break any mods you have installed. Mod makers will need to update their mods to work with the new version.
Arrowhead has also made it so that, shortly after the slim version becomes standard, players will be able to opt into the larger file size with the “prod_legacy” code. However, due to the savings the game has seen, this won’t last for long.
