Arrowhead Game Studios is in the thick of removing Hard Disk Drive (HDD) compatibility for the PC version of Helldivers 2. This considered action, confirmed with Arrowhead’s CEO, Shams Jorjani on Discord, will constitute a remarkably policy change from the studio and directly target one of the most constant technical woes of the gaming community, storage-wise: space taken by the title on a computer.
As Deputy Technical Director of the studio explained earlier, supporting slower HDDs imposes data duplication as far as commonly shared assets such as environmental textures are concerned and, needed, to meet the physical travel distance, inside the hard drive’s read head, to minimize load times in an older rotational storage. However, this measure superinflated the storage requirements for the PC version, which now lists a massive 135GB on its current Steam page-simply put, an increase in barely the previous year compared to the console versions that rely exclusively on high-speed Solid-State Drives (SSDs). Hence, they’ve had to shrink install footprints. At the moment, this brings the PlayStation 5 version down to approximately 35GB.
While the developer initially took a tentatively hard line on a hard cutoff-expressing that they first needed to ascertain how many players stuck with HDDs-the install size has now ballooned beyond what anyone could consider reasonable. Confirming all the top optimization possibilities are now firmly “being looked into” is Jorjani on probable abandonment of support. One other middle-ground solution-ensuring delivering a smaller footprint whilst minimizing disruption-involves creating separate game builds. Here, the team can strip out all the unnecessary data that HDDs typically require from a new SSD-optimized build, whilst possibly maintaining a legacy build for users still running older non-SSD storage.
Alongside all these, the optimization effort is towards the game’s size, something that is parallel to other large technical efforts ongoing at the studio. The CEO stated separately that solving the myriad performance problems that plague Helldivers 2 would be a long-term project, advising gamers that the full resolution would take “many more months.” The size reduction in the file is thus understood as part of a much more extensive long-term technical overhaul that will be necessary for the future health and access of the live-service title massively popular.
