Have you ever ever observed that Helldivers 2 takes up much more room on PC than it does on both Xbox Collection X|S or PlayStation 5? At 150GB, the sport is roughly 3 times greater on PC than on consoles. In response to Arrowhead sport studio deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong, the explanation why is that Helldivers 2 continues to be catering to a small phase of PC customers.
In a prolonged publish on Steam, Armstrong wrote that Helldivers 2’s set up footprint is so massive as a result of most of it’s duplicated for the good thing about gamers who nonetheless use mechanical arduous disk drives. It is an antiquated course of that options duplicate information grouped shut collectively in an effort to scale back loading occasions. Armstrong notes that the duplication just isn’t needed for gamers who’ve lengthy since upgraded to stable state drives, however Arrowhead has had issue figuring out what number of gamers stay on mechanical HDDs.
“What number of Helldivers 2 gamers are nonetheless utilizing mechanical HDD? The reality is that we do not presently know,” Armstrong wrote. “Even the Steam person surveys are unable to provide us information on mechanical HDD use within the general gamer inhabitants. Our greatest estimates put it at round 12% of all PC players, however the information may be very unreliable and depends on a number of extrapolations. Till we are able to extra precisely decide the variety of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is put in on, it’s troublesome to know what number of gamers will probably be impacted by decreasing the quantity of knowledge duplication. Even when that quantity is small, understand that the load time for every participant dropping right into a mission is decided by the slowest member of the squad.”
Armstrong laid out some potential options and famous that the subsequent replace will make some progress in the direction of shrinking the file dimension. Nevertheless, he warns that gamers might not discover the distinction “as a result of the brand new stuff we have added will eat these beneficial properties.” For a medium-term answer, Arrowhead plans to bundle widespread property collectively somewhat than that includes so many duplicate recordsdata. The draw back is that it’s going to make the sport barely slower for mechanical HDD customers, however he hopes to maintain the load occasions to “lower than 30 seconds.”
Going ahead, Arrowhead may even work to enhance its engine and enhance compression methods that scale back the necessity for duplication. Nevertheless, Armstrong added that the studio does not know but if the affect on load occasions will make this an infeasible answer.
Arrowhead Sport Studio CEO Shams Jorjani not too long ago acknowledged that the workforce’s objective for Helldivers 2 is to maintain it going without end, somewhat than shifting on to Helldivers 3. The studio additionally launched a patch that tackled cave crashes and audio bugs. Extra not too long ago, Arrowhead acknowledged an extended checklist of issues to handle, together with “points together with efficiency drops, stability hiccups, freezes, and the annoying audio bugs.” An replace is deliberate for later this month, however a lot of these points might take extra time to repair.