It's no surprise that modern AAA games these days take up hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, especially if you're playing on a PC. But somehow Arrowhead Game Studios, the developers behind the popular co-op shooter, managed to do it Helldivers 2have managed to significantly reduce the size of the game by 85%.
According to a recent post on Steam, this reduction was made possible with the support of Nixxes Software, best known for developing high-quality PC ports of Sony's biggest PlayStation titles. The developers were able to achieve this by deduplicating the game data, which resulted in the size being reduced from around 154GB to just around 23GB, saving a massive around 131GB of storage space.
Originally, the game's large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives, as data duplication serves to reduce loading times on older storage media. But it turns out that Arrowhead's estimates of hard drive load times, based on industry data, were wrong.
With their latest game-specific data measurements, the developers have confirmed that the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will result in a worst-case scenario increase in mission load times of just a few seconds. Furthermore, the post states: “Most of the loading time takes Helldivers 2 is due to level generation rather than asset loading. This level generation occurs in parallel with loading assets from disk and is therefore the main determining factor for loading time.”
This is a promising development and an incentive for other game developers to take note and perhaps make an effort to save valuable storage space for PC gamers.
You can access the “slim” version of Helldivers 2 by opting for the latest beta update via Steam, which is intended to offer functionally the same experience as the previous versions apart from the smaller install size. All progress, war contributions and purchases are also expected to carry over to the new slim version. There is also the option to opt out of the beta at any time if any potential issues arise.
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