Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

(store.steampowered.com)

30 points by SergeAx 4 days ago|17 comments

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Calzifer 4 days ago

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...

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SergeAx 3 days ago

They downloaded 43 GB instead of 152 GB, according to SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/ Now it is 20 GB => 21 GB.

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habbekrats 4 days ago

it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....

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wvbdmp 4 days ago

The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.

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tetris11 4 days ago

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

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BizarroLand 3 days ago

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.

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breve 4 days ago

Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times.

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habbekrats 4 days ago

do they even sell disc of these game?...

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andrewstuart 4 days ago

How is there so much duplication?

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breve 4 days ago

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...

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imtringued 4 days ago

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.

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Xss3 4 days ago

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.

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jy14898 4 days ago

The post stated that it was believed duplication improved loading times on computers with HDDs rather than SSDs

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dontlaugh 4 days ago

Which is true. It’s an old technique going back to CD games consoles, to avoid seeks.

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SergeAx 3 days ago

Is it really possible to control file locations on HDD via Windows NTFS API?

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dontlaugh 3 days ago

No, not at all. But by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially without additional seeks.

That does force you to duplicate some assets a lot. It's also more important the slower your seeks are. This technique is perfect for disc media, since it has a fixed physical size (so wasting space on it is irrelevant) and slow seeks.

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tetris11 4 days ago

I wonder if a certain Amelie-clad repacker noticed the same reduction in their release of the same game.