Helldivers 2’s PC Version Sees Drastically Reduced File Size Through Deduplication Technique

Modern games have an obesity problem. They took way too much storage space for the mostly negligible improvement in visual fidelity, with most games easily occupying more than 100GB of space. Recently, Helldivers 2 went through a slimming regime that cuts its file size by a whopping 85% through a space-saving technique called deduplication.

Helldivers 2 Liberates Disk Space

To really give you an idea just how big the deal is, the existing Helldivers 2 PC port requires around 154GB of storage space, or nearly one-sixth of a 1TB SSD’s capacity, for reference. As written in its update blog post on Steam, developer Arrowhead Game Studio tasked Nixxes, resposible for the game’s PlayStation 5 port, to help with the PC port’s obesity problem. Just so you know, this game only occupies 36GB of space on Sony’s gaming console, so there’s potential for a good bit of size reduction to be done here.

By using deduplication – a technique commonly used in datacenters to maximize space efficiency by removing all additional copies of a file throughout a storage medium – Helldivers 2 PC now only measures 23GB in size, cutting around 131 gigabytes worth of excess fat. Before you worry about any tradeoffs or unintended side effects with such a drastic size reduction, worry not. Developers at Arrowhead says this “will result in minimal changes to load times – seconds at most.”

So what’s the deal with excessive file sizes in the first place? It is likely that much of the game assets was duplicated as a way to cope with HDD’s slow loading times (by minimizing disk access times, in theory), but the reality is that deduplication didn’t cause as much trouble to these spinning discs as originally thought. At least for the 11% of Helldivers 2 players out there, they won’t be entirely eliminated from the hardware support list like some other games have opted to do in recent years.

Still, the devs practiced caution and decided to put this ultra-slimmed version of Helldivers 2 as a beta release for now, and anyone can opt-in to test out the game to see if everything still works. It noted that despite the significant file size differences, game functionality remains the same; existing game progress gets carried over with no adjustments required. Should the test be successful, Arrowhead says this version will eventually become the default, sparing everyone’s SSDs and HDDs with extra chunk of space for everything else.

Pokdepinion: 85% is an insane figure. Can you imagine how much space we could save if all games follow this through?