Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

Re:Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction by Hikikomori on Thursday December 11, 2025 @07:48AM (#46230735)

They used industry data to make the decision first to avoid potential multi minute load times for 10% or do of their players, hard to test all kinds of pc configurations. Now they have telemetry showing that it doesn't matter because another parallel task takes about as much time anyway.

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Re:Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction by whywhywhywhy on Thursday December 11, 2025 @08:53AM (#46231355)

Maybe it's changed a lot statistically in the last few years but for long time PC gamers used to have the mantra of small SSD for the OS and large HDD for games if they're price conscious so I could see that being assumed to be much more normal during development.

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Re:Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction by Dylan16807 on Thursday December 11, 2025 @03:40PM (#46236842)

It's a shameful tragedy of the commons if you bloat your game 6x because you think your customers don't have enough SSD space for their active games.

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Re:Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction by justsomehnguy on Thursday December 11, 2025 @09:30AM (#46231835)

So they premature optimized for a wrong case.

> multi minute load times

23Gb / 100mb / 60s = 3.92m

So in the worst case when everything is loaded at once (how on a system with < 32Gb RAM?) it takes 4 minutes.

Considering GTA whatever version could sit for 15 minutes at the loading screen because nobody bothered to check why - the industry could really say not to bother.

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Re:Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction by _aavaa_ on Thursday December 11, 2025 @10:49AM (#46232853)

But they did NOT know it would lead to multi-minute load time. They did not measure a baseline.

Instead they did blindly did extra work and 6x’ed the storage requirement.

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