Even the most fervent Super Earth bootlicker wouldn’t deny that Helldivers 2 has been suffering some technical problems, especially after the performance-sapping Into the Unjust update. Developers Arrowhead say a patch is coming, and in the meantime, have shared the first in a series of techy blog posts burrowing into the engineering side of how the co-op bugshooter comes together. Entry number one doesn’t deal with framerates, though: instead it explains the game’s longer-running issue with its increasingly gargantuan, 150GB-ish install size.
Earlier this year, players had already discovered the most immediate cause of Helldivers 2’s swelling: its installation is stuffed with duplicate files, spanning weapon models to tree and rock textures. This had not only ballooned the install size over time, as successive updates added more and more assets, but left PC players with the unanswered question of why their SSDs were filled with photocopied rocket launchers. Especially as the PS5 and Xbox versions, weighing in around a third of the size, exhibited no such duplication.
As the post (credited to deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong) now explains, including multiple file copies was Arrowhead’s solution to the slow loading times of creaking old hard drives. A lingering inconvenience to some PCs, but not the exclusively SSD-equipped consoles.
“The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time,” Armstrong writes. “An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to “seek” or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.
“Imagine a large game level with various objects – trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”
I know the feeling – I recently flooded my flat with spare scissors, having tired of never remembering where I put our sole original pair. Hard drives might have more reliable memories than me but when it comes to Helldivers 2, Arrowhead evidently don’t consider the time they would spend searching for individual, non-duplicate files to constitute an acceptable loading speed.
The post also considers alternate solutions, including removing or repacking certain duplicates – which would make HDD loading slower, but potentially cut the file size – or split off 4K textures as an optional download, something Armstrong says is not “natively” supported by the game’s engine but could still be made possible.
It’s tempting to mutter “Or everyone could just be sensible and get an SSD.” I’d probably be muttering it myself, had almost every facet of gaming PC building and ownership not become so miserably expensive in the past few years, in turn making cheap mech drives genuinely harder to upgrade from on tight budgets. Hopefully Arrowhead can find a fix that works for everyone.
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