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Helldivers 2 install size reduction effort yields 131GB in cuts, and you can try the slim build right now
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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From reading the article (gasp!):
It looks like a large chunk of it was that they were optimizing their release for spinning disk hard drives (HDDs). With HDDs and optical media, there is a substantial impact on performance when you are fetching data that is physically close to the last data you looked at. So a common technique was to actually duplicate commonly used data.
As an example: You fight Tyranids on sandy and snowy planets. The assets for each of those planets are in different parts of the disc/install. But you'll need those same bugs in each planet so... you also install the Tyranid assets alongside each planet's assets for fast fetching.
This is ALSO why disk defragmentation used to be so important.
But if you are assuming that everyone has an SSD (or better), those access times are nowhere near as crippling and it is a lot easier to just install the assets once.
That should be an option they add, not something forced on every user. A lot games are just poorly made..
I can understand some duplication but they removed nearly 6 times the amount of data the actual game needs. It's insane that this was published like that...
And it is not at all uncommon.
There is a reason that, back in the day, there were a LOT of ways to compress game installs so that you could burn it to a CD-R and so forth. And this was incredibly prevalent on consoles up until the current generation when SSDs became default... except that a lot of games were still being developed for previous gen and older hardware PCs.
When Blizzard made a big deal about how WoW now requires an SSD? It was for stuff like this.
I wonder why they even did that in the first place.
SSDs have been common in the PC space for a while, and this game didn't come out for last-gen consoles like the PS4 who still shipped with spinning rust...