It seems today is a good day to become Helldivers 2 player: in addition to buff-happy Patch Into the Unjust 5.0.0 The developers of the previously released Arrowhead have shared an update on their efforts to reduce the number of co-op shooters. giant installation size. And it's not so much a shave as it is a fully fueled chainsaw, traffic lights be damned. How Message on Steam explains that a beta version is now available that reduces the game's size from 154 GB to 23 GB – a 131 GB (!!!) reduction. It's like surgically removing an entire Black Myth: Wukong it grew from his back.
There's still good news for owners of mechanical hard drives, whose outdated technology—compared to the new, cool, and beautiful SSDs—has been easily blamed for previous developer blog for the bloat that Helldivers 2 had created. In short, the fear was that Arrowhead's measures, by removing duplicate resources that were considered vital to keeping the game running on slow-loading hard drives, would render older, lower-spec PCs unable to perform immersively. This, according to a new blog, turned out to be a miscalculation: HDD users expected loading screens to last only a few seconds. This does not seem to be an effective loss of support.
“I am pleased to report that our worst forecasts did not materialize,” the statement said. “These boot time projections were based on industry data comparing boot times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5-fold difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were very conservative and doubled this forecast again to account for unknown unknowns.
“Everything is different now. We have real measurements specific to our game, not industry data. We now know that the true number of players actively playing HD2 on a mechanical hard drive was around 11% over the past week (it seems our estimates weren't that bad). We now know that, unlike most games, most of the loading times in Helldivers 2 are related to level generation rather than resource loading. This generation of levels occurs in parallel with the loading of resources from disk and is therefore a major determinant of loading time. We now know that this is true even for mechanical hard drive users.”
So the forest of identical trees is not to blame after all. Looks like everyone, including me, owes these bark textures an apology.
However, it is not certain that the lightweight 23GB build will be available to all players as is. A beta is a beta, which potentially means bugs, glitches, or even longer loading times than Arrowhead's calculations predict. However, you can check it out for yourself right now – to take part, just open Helldivers 2's Properties menu on Steam, go to the Betas tab, click “prod_slim” (without the quotes) in the Private Betas box, and select the slim build from the drop-down menu. To opt out, select “No” from the same menu, provided you haven't already filled the last remaining 131GB of disk space with high-resolution photos of the redwood tree.
