Helldivers 2 Just Lost 130GB Of Weight, And It Is A Miracle

I am looking at my poor, abused SSD right now and weeping tears of joy.

In an era where Call of Duty demands a dedicated hard drive and every AAA game seems to weigh as much as a small moon, Arrowhead Game Studios has done the impossible. They have optimized Helldivers 2 to the point where it almost feels like a mistake.

According to their latest Tech Blog, a new update is available right now that reduces the PC installation size from a bloated 154GB to a lean, mean 23GB.

That is not a typo. They shaved off 131GB of data. That is an 85% reduction. If this was a diet commercial, people would call it a scam.

The Technical Wizardry

You might be wondering how this is even physically possible without the game looking like a potato. Did they delete the textures? Did they replace the Terminids with low-poly cubes?

No. It turns out the culprit was data duplication.

Arrowhead partnered with Nixxes (the porting wizards Sony usually hires to fix things) to "completely de-duplicate" the game data. In the past, developers would duplicate assets to help mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) find data faster. It kept load times down by putting the same texture in fifty different places on the disk.

Arrowhead was worried that removing this duplication would tank performance for people still running the game on spinning rust. But after looking at the data, they realized two things.

First, only about 11% of their players are running the game on an HDD. Second, and more importantly, the load times in Helldivers 2 are mostly bottled-necked by procedural level generation, not asset streaming.

The result is that the game is 130GB lighter, and load times have increased by "seconds at most" for HDD users. If you are on an SSD (which you should be), you probably won't notice a difference at all, except for all the free space you suddenly have.

How To Join The "Slim" Beta

This update is technically in "public beta" right now, but you can grab it immediately if you want your drive space back. I did this myself this morning and it works flawlessly.

You don't need to sign up for anything or join a Discord. You just need to tweak a Steam setting.

Step 1: Open Properties

Go to your Steam Library. Right-click on Helldivers 2 and select Properties.

Step 2: Select The Beta

Click on the Betas tab on the left side of the window. Look for the "Beta Participation" dropdown menu.

Step 3: Download The Update

Select prod_slim from the list. Close the window and let Steam download the update. It will essentially redownload the game structure, but when it finishes, your folder will be tiny.

A Warning For Modders

Arrowhead did issue one specific warning. If you are running mods, this patch will probably break your game.

They recommend doing a clean install if you want to switch to the slim version, or just waiting until your mods are updated. For the rest of us vanilla players, it is open season.

This "slim" version will eventually become the default version for everyone once Arrowhead is sure there are no game-breaking bugs. But honestly, I see no reason to wait. 130GB is enough space to install Baldur's Gate 3 again. I'm taking it.

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