Arrowhead Game Studios has buried the “fat” install version of Helldivers 2 following months of improvements and testing on the game’s new “slim” file structure. After much testing, even players running Arrowhead’s game from mechanical hard drives will no longer need to use the game’s significantly larger install option.

In a recent announcement, Arrowhead confirmed that the “large build” of Helldivers 2 on Steam will be officially delisted. Following the release of the game’s intensive new “Machinery of Oppression” update, which saw players fight on the Automaton homeworld, the team is confident that there is no reason for the game’s larger install size to exist.

The massive size of the game’s PC version was a huge issue for many PC players of Helldivers 2 last year. While console sizes were miniscule in comparison, PC players were downloading multiple duplicates of every asset to account for the slow read speeds of mechanical hard drives, even if that player was playing on an SSD.

This file duplication trick is used on many games with high file-sizes, including Call of Duty, Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, Ark: Survival Evolved, and others. However, after months of complainants, Arrowhead teamed up with PC porting studio Nixxes to slim down the file size from 150GB to just 23GB on PC.

With that said, loading times have increased for players on mechanical hard drives, and the slowest load in a group does effect the load speed of everyone else in the party. However, while this change was expected to increase load times by minutes, further optimisation has meant that HDD players are only taking a few extra seconds to load instead.

Alongside the game’s file size issues, Arrowhead Game Studios has continued working on other PC optimisations for the game. For example, the game now suffers from substantially less crashes (although they still do occur) and performance has massively improved since the game’s horrendous Into the Unjust update last year.

There’s still quite a lot of work to do with the PC performance of Helldivers 2 right now, but the game is in a significantly better place now compared to last year. With that said, Arrowhead is also continuing to work on new content for the game with additional Warbonds, new campaigns, and additional enemies.