Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction
85 comments
·December 3, 2025everdrive
heftig
The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game.
As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.
chamomeal
The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game.
When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.
Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
speeder
All other games from the same studio have the same features.
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
whalesalad
It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.
rincebrain
A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.
jfindper
I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.)
Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?
brainzap
oh no
philistine
You put the nail on the head with the first Pokémon, but Helldivers 2 is an order of magnitude smaller in the amateur-to-success ratio.
Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise.
Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.
delichon
Thank you for your service in keeping the galaxy safe for managed democracy.
_aavaa_
My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild
whizzter
It's an valid issue, those of us who worked back in the day on GD/DVD,etc games really ran into bad loading walls if we didn't duplicate data for straight streaming.
Data-sizes has continued to grow and HDD-seek times haven't gotten better due to physics (even if streaming probably has kept up), the assumption isn't too bad considering history.
It's a good that they actually revisited it _when they had time_ because launching a game, especially a multiplayer one, will run into a lot of breaking bugs and this (while a big one, pun intended) is still by most classifications a lower priority issue.
Hendrikto
> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
They basically just made the numbers up. Wild.
fullstop
It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham.
The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.
"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."
So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.
The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"
The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"
rjzzleep
On the flip side I don't remember who did it, but basically extracting textures on disk fixed all the performance issues UE5 has on some benchmarks(sorry for being vague, but I can't find the source material right now). But their assumption is in fact a sound one.
Normal_gaussian
Yes. Its quite common for games to have mods that repack textures or significantly tweak the UE5 config at the moment - and its very common to see users using it when it doesn't actually affect their use cases.
As an aside, I do enjoy the modding community naming over multiple iterations of mods - "better loading" -> "better better loading" -> "best loading" -> "simplified loading" -> "x's simplified loading" -> "y's simplified loading" -> "z's better simplified loading". Where 'better' is often some undisclosed metric based on some untested assumptions.
dwroberts
It seems plausible to me that this strategy was a holdover from the first game, which shipped for PS4 and XBO
I don’t know about the Xbox, but on PS4 the hard drive was definitely not fast at all
maccard
I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed.
I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.
Xelbair
>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
>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.
they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
maccard
Nowhere in that does it say “we did zero benchmarking and just went with hearsay”. Basing things on industry data is solid - looking at the steam hardware surveys if a good way to figure out the variety of hardware used without commissioning your own reports. Tech choices are no different.
Do you benchmark every single decision you make on every system on every project you work on? Do you check that redis operation is actually O(1) or do you rely on hearsay. Do you benchmark every single SQL query, every DTO, the overhead of the DI Framework, connection pooler, json serializer, log formatter? Do you ever rely on your own knowledge without verifying the assumptions? Of course you do - you’re human and we have to make some baseline assumptions, and sometimes they’re wrong.
creshal
"Industry hearsay" in this case was probably Sony telling game devs how awesome the PS5's custom SSD was gonna be, and nobody bothered to check their claims.
alias_neo
They admitted to testing nothing, they just [googled it].
To be fair, the massive install size was probably the least of the problems with the game, it's performance has been atrocious, and when they released for xbox, the update that came with it broke the game entirely for me and was unplayable for a few weeks until they released another update.
In their defense, they seem to have been listening to players and have been slowly but steadily improving things.
Playing Helldivers 2 is a social thing for me where I get together online with some close friends and family a few times a month and we play some helldivers and have a chat, aside from that period where I couldn't play because it was broken, it's been a pretty good experience playing it on Linux; even better since I switched from nvidia to AMD just over a week ago.
I'm glad they reduced the install size and saved me ~130GB, and I only had to download about another 20GB to do it.
Pannoniae
The good old "studios don't play their own games" strikes again :P
Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware. That will quickly teach them the value of fixing stuff like this and optimising the game in general.
whizzter
People literally play the games they work on all the time, it's more or less what most do.
Pay 2000$ for indie games so studios could grow up without being beholden to shareholders and we could perhaps get that "perfect" QA,etc.
It's a fucking market economy and people aren't making pong level games that can be simply tuned, you really get what you pay for.
Forgeties79
They could have been lying I guess but I listened to a great podcast about the development of Helldivers 2 (I think it was gamemakers notebook) and one thing that was constantly brought up was as they iterated they forced a huge chunk of the team to sit down and play it. That’s how things like diving from a little bit too high ended up with you faceplanting and rag-dolling, tripping when jet packing over a boulder that you get a little too close to, etc. They found that making it comically realistic in some areas led to more unexpected/emergent gameplay that was way more entertaining. Turrets and such not caring if you’re in the line of fire was brought up I believe.
That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.
wongarsu
It's pretty standard to do that duplication for games on CD/DVD because seek times are so long. It probably just got carried over as the "obviously correct" way of doing things, since HDDs are like DVDs if you squint a bit
esrauch
It's very easy to accidentally get misleading benchmarking results in 100 different ways, I wouldn't assume they did no benchmarking when they did the duplication.
Xelbair
worse, in their post they basically said:
>we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.
functionmouse
Some kind of evil, dark counterpart to Moore's law in the making
dnrvs
too many arm chair game devs who think they know better in this thread
Calzifer
I was curious if they optimized the download. Did it download the 'optimized' ~150 GB and wasting a lot of time there or did it download the ~20 GB unique data and duplicated as part of the installation.
I still don't know but found instead an interesting reddit post were users found and analyzed this "waste of space" three month ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1mw3qcx/why_the...
PS: just found it. According to this Steam discussion it does not download the duplicate data and back then it only blew up to ~70 GB.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/discussions/0/43725019...
maccard
Steam breaks your content into 1MB Chunks and compresses/dedupes them [0]
[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading#AppStructur...
SergeAx
They downloaded 43 GB instead of 152 GB, according to SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/ Now it is 20 GB => 21 GB.
habbekrats
it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....
maccard
This isn't unique to games, and it's not just "today". Go back a decade [0] find people making similar observations about one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
high_na_euv
It was needed. Just the trade off wasnt worth it.
Zambyte
It was wanted and intentionally selected, but it wasn't needed.
Tepix
I'd argue it was incompetence.
wvbdmp
The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.
tetris11
In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger.
That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
crote
> That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!
Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.
BizarroLand
I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.
breve
Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times.
habbekrats
do they even sell disc of these game?...
tetris11
I wonder if a certain Amelie-clad repacker noticed the same reduction in their release of the same game.
debugnik
Helldivers 2 is an always-online game, you won't find it cracked.
NullPrefix
such games can only get private servers
debugnik
Yes, but those are rarely a thing for most live service games. Unless someone is working on a reimplementation of the entire server side, there's no point in offering or downloading pirate copies.
squigz
Fitgirl and Anna (of Anna's Archive) are modern day heroes.
null
andrewstuart
How is there so much duplication?
breve
They duplicate files to reduce load times. Here's how Arrowhead Game Studios themselves tell it:
https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/2025/10/helldivers-2-te...
imtringued
I don't think this is the real explanation. If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO), the concept of "seek time" would become almost meaningless. This optimization will make fetching from both HDDs and SSDs faster. They would be going out of their way to make their product worse for no reason.
Xss3
If they fill your harddrive youre less likely to install other games. If you see a huge install size youre less likely to uninstall with plans to reinstall later because thatd take a long time.
toast0
Solid state drives tend to respond well to parallel reads, so it's not so clear. If you're reading one at a time, sequential access is going to be better though.
But for a mechanical drive, you'll get much better throughput on sequential reads than random reads, even with command queuing. I think earlier discussion showed it wasn't very effective in this case and taking 6x the space for a marginal benefit for the small % of users with mechanical drives isn't worth while...
extraduder_ire
"97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
MLgulabio
[dead]
jy14898
The post stated that it was believed duplication improved loading times on computers with HDDs rather than SSDs
crest
The idea is to duplicate assets so loading a "level" is just sequential reading from the file system. It's required on optical media and can be very useful on spinning disks too. On SSDs it's insane. The logic should've been the other way around. Do a speed test on start an offer to "optimise for spinning media" if the performance metrics look like it would help.
If the game was ~20GB instead of ~150GB almost no player with the required CPU+GPU+RAM combination would be forced to put it on a HDD instead of a SSD.
I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their game to be as popular as it's become, and I think we're still inheriting flaws from the surprise interest in the game. (some of this plays out in the tug of war between the dev team's hopes for a realistic grunt fantasy vs. and the player base's horde power fantasy.)