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Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

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Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#91

Post by darthcircuit »

jfindper wrote: post #81
rincebrain wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.

I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.) Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?

Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game.

You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2.

The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for instance. Ice + air is a focused blizzard, etc.

there’s hundreds to learn and that’s your main weapon in the game. There’s even a spell you can cast that will randomly kick someone you’re playing with out of the game.

It’s great fun with friends, but can be annoying to play sometimes. If you try it, go with kb/m. It supports controller, but is way more difficult to build the spells.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#92

Post by heftig »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #90
everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes. The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others. The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire r…

The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#93

Post by FieryMechanic »

Xelbair wrote: post #47
maccard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed. I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.

>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns. >We now know that, contrary to most games, the…

They made a decision based on existing data. This isn't unreasonable as you are pretending, especially as PC hardware can be quite diverse.

You will be surprised what some people are playing games on. e.g. I know people that still use Windows 7 on a AMD BullDozer rig. Atypical for sure, but not unheard of.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#94

Post by FieryMechanic »

heftig wrote: post #92
FieryMechanic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes. The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others. The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire r…

The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.

I also think that the tutorial would be tedious if it went through too much of the mechanics. They show you the basics, the rest you pick up through trial and error.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#95

Post by embedding-shape »

heftig wrote: post #84
everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game. As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in t…

> depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing

That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#96

Post by bombcar »

fullstop wrote: post #79
Hendrikto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknown…

It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham. The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this. "I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it." So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too. The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end…

It's the corollary to Chesterton's Fence - don't remove it until you know why it's there, but also investigate why it's there.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#97

Post by 123malware321 »

FieryMechanic wrote: post #90
everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes. The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others. The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire r…

considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense.

People make much more smooth and complex experiences in old engines.

You need to know your engine as a dev and dont cross its limits at the costs of user-experiences and then blame your tools....

The whole story about more data making load times better is utter rubbish. Its a sign of pisspoor resource management and usage. For the game they have, they should have realized a 130GB install is unacceptable. It's not like they have very elaborate environments. A lot of similar textures and structures everywhere.. its not like its some huge unique world like The Witcher or such games...

There is an astronomical amount of information available for free on how to optimise game engines, loads of books, articles, courses.

How much money do you think they have made so far?

"Arrowhead Game Studios' revenue saw a massive surge due to Helldivers 2, reporting around $100 million in turnover and $76 million in profit for the year leading up to mid-2025, significantly increasing its valuation and attracting a 15.75% investment from Tencent"

75 million in profit but can't figure out how to optimise a game engine. get out.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#98

Post by finalarbiter »

darthcircuit wrote: post #91
jfindper wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.) Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?

Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game. You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2. The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for insta…

> maybe something else

Water, Life, Arcane, Shield, Lightning, Cold, Fire, and Earth. [0] It's worth noting that, though you can combine most of the elements to form new spells (and with compounding effects, for example wetting or steaming an enemy enhances lightning damage), you cannot typically combine opposites like lightning/ground, which will instead cancel out. Killed myself many times trying to cast lightning spells while sopping wet.

In my experience, though, nobody used the element names—my friends and I just referred to them by their keybinds. QFASA, anyone?

[0] https://magicka.fandom.com/wiki/Elements

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#99

Post by pixl97 »

imtringued wrote: post #11
breve wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They duplicate files to reduce load times. Here's how Arrowhead Game Studios themselves tell it: https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/2025/10/helldivers-2-te...

I don't think this is the real explanation. If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO), the concept of "seek time" would become almost meaningless. This optimization will make fetching from both HDDs and SSDs faster. They would be going out of their way to make their product worse for no reason.

>If they gave the filesystem a list of files to fetch in parallel (async file IO)

This does not work if you're doing tons of small IO and you want something fast.

Lets say were on a HDD with 200IOPS and we need to read 3000 small files randomly across the hard drive.

Well, at minimum this is going to take 15's seconds plus any additional seek time.

Now, lets say we zip up those files in a solid archive. You'll read it in half a second. The problem comes in when different levels all need different 3000 files. Then you end deduping a bunch of stuff.

Now, where this typically falls apart for modern game assets is they are getting very large which tends to negate seek times by a lot.

Re: Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction

#100

Post by embedding-shape »

everdrive wrote: post #59

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their g…

This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid off, and of course there is always 100s of more important tasks to do before launching a game, but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.
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