Helldivers 2 on PC is a solid version of Sony’s 2024 online co-op shooter. However, one significant flaw of the PC port was its massive installation size, which took up around 150GB of space and was approximately three times larger than the game on console. Arrowhead promised this would be cut down. And a new update does just that.
On December 2, Arrowhead Games posted a lengthy and detailed post about the studio’s efforts to make the PC port of Helldivers 2 less bloated. According to the team behind the sci-fi shooter, Helldivers 2’s total installation size on PC has been reduced from approximately 154 GB to around 23GB. That’s over 130GB slashed, which is wild. Arrowhead thanked support studio Nixxes, which apparently helped get the install size down to such a small amount.
So why was Helldivers 2 on PC so big compared to the console ports? Well, as explained in this post from Arrowhead back in October, Helldivers 2 on PC supports both solid-state drives and older mechanical hard drives. In an effort to keep load times down and make Helldivers 2 more optimized, Arrowhead included redundant and repeated files so that older drives that still spin tiny platters and seek out data wouldn’t be bogged down as much. This was a common technique back when games shipped on optical discs and when consoles didn’t use much faster solid-state drives. That’s also why the Xbox and PS5 ports of Helldivers 2 were smaller in size: Those devices all have SSDs and don’t need redundant, repeated data to optimize loading.
The majority of what was removed from Helldivers 2 in the most recent update on PC were these redundant files. That might make you worry about players on PC still using older drives, but Arrowhead says load times for players on older systems will only be increased by a few seconds, a worthy tradeoff to get the file size below 25 GB.
For now, this update is optional on PC as Arrowhead continues testing it to make sure nothing was overlooked. But eventually, sometime next year, this reduction in installation size will be mandatory as the studio doesn’t want to support two different versions of the game on PC.
