It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days, especially if you are gaming on a PC. But somehow, Arrowhead Game Studios, the developers behind the popular co-op shooter Helldivers 2, have managed to substantially cut the game’s size by 85%.
As per a recent post on Steam, this reduction was made possible with support from Nixxes Software, best known for developing high-quality PC ports of Sony’s biggest PlayStation titles. The developers were able to achieve this by de-duplicating game data, which resulted in bringing the size down from ~154GB to just ~23GB, saving a massive ~131GB of storage space.
Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect.
With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “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.”
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