Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB • Hacker News Board

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#241

Post by WreckVenom » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #99

donatj wrote: post #97

> "It's no surprise to see modern AAA games occupying hundreds of gigabytes of storage these days" Is it not? I've genuinely never understood it! I used to do a little bit of level building for IdTech3 games back in the day but it's been 20 years. I'm not totally ignorant of what's involved, just mostly ignorant. I really want to know though, what is all that data!? Textures? In particular I find the massive disparit…

These days I am just assuming it is textures. Textures for graphic quality, that I don't need on my merely full HD screens. Makes me usually not even bother buying, let alone installing such a game. Even 23 GB is still tons. When I compare that with how much fun I can have playing games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics, I would rather safe money, than spending it and having to go through my files and delete…

> Even 23 GB is still tons

Maybe back in 2007. I have games from that period that would probably be 30GB. 23GB is pretty good.

BTW, HellDivers 2 has pretty decent gameplay. Lots of depth to the game. Unfortunately they've decreased the difficulty as of late.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#242

Post by buellerbueller » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:50 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #93

afavour wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consum…

If 5x faster refers to a difference of "a few seconds" as the article says, then perhaps 5x (relative improvement) is the wrong optimization metric versus "a few seconds" (absolute improvement).

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#243

Post by ethbr1 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #166

jeroenhd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By their own industry data ( https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... ), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin. The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that t…

I expect better from HN, where most of us are engineers or engineer-adjacent. It's fair to question Arrowhead's priorities but... too lazy Really? I think the PC install size probably should have been addressed sooner too, but... which do you think is more likely? Arrowhead is a whole company full of "lazy" developers who just don't like to work very hard? Or do you think they had their hands full with other optimiza…

An 85% disk size reduction at minimal performance impact is negligent by the standard of professional excellence.

But that's also par for the course with AA+ games these days, where shoving content into an engine is paramount and everything else is 'as long as it works.' Thanks, Bethesda.

Evidenced by the litany of quality of life bug fixes and performance improvements modders hack into EOL games.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#244

Post by gangstead » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #133

fleabitdev wrote: post #28

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher. In other words, t…

> the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month Out of curiousity, how do you come up with a number for this? I would have zero idea of how to even start estimating such a thing, or even being able to tell you whether "marginal cost of wasted hard drive storage" is even a thing for consumers.

Maybe average cost of next-size-up SSD price divided by a SWAG of a gaming PC lifetime? So if I had to buy a 2 TB NVMe stick instead of a 1 TB stick it's an extra $70 and I upgrade after 5 years that's only about $1 per TB-Month. I don't game I have no idea if those are good numbers.

The cheapest storage tier on s3 with instant retrieval is $.004 per GB-Month which implies AWS can still make money at $4 per TB-Month so $2.50 for consumer hardware sounds reasonable to me.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#245

Post by bgro » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

This is yet another thing I’ve been saying is technically feasible in a large variety of games immediately since it started happening to game sizes around 2015.

I’ve had nothing except people screaming at me that I’m wrong and that this is just how modern games have to be. There’s always some gaslight argument about how I’m wrong and actually the devs are in fact geniuses because of some genius trick about a variety of systems significantly bloating the size.

Rather than try to look at the problem, I get continuously attacked with retconned reasons trying to justify every decision going into this bloat. This is exactly the same dev retcon trend train we saw with Cloud (“No, wrong, it’s not computers. It’s servers. Totally different. And it’s not even servers, it’s cloud.”) and MicroServices (“There’s literally no reason to ever not use microservices unless you’re a legacy dev. Especially on The Cloud, which is different and not comparable in any way to a a self hosted server.”)

I’m 3/3 so far. Waiting for you guys to still figure out leetcode and how this actually captures the inverse of the thing you’re trying to account for. But I already know you’re going to retcon that argument too and say ackshully leetcode DOES work to hire developers because we want to hire people who are wealthy enough to have time to memorize questions and answers. We always knew developers would have AI (lol) and this paper that retroactively applies a matching hypothesis that trends with leetcode is actually what smart developers like me knew all along.”

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#246

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #39

eska wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs. Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully util…

> HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs. HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...

64MB...

Microsoft has a paper somewhere that shows IO speed starts to drop when fragments of files get below 64MB. So you can split that file up into a few thousand pieces without much performance loss at all.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#247

Post by thunderfork » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #137

jeroenhd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... > 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.

Instead of y'know, running their own game on a hdd. It's literally "instead of profiling our own app we profiled competition's app and made decisions based on that".

[dead]

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#248

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #196

They had the size at 7x duplication to save load times for hdds? WTH

You may misunderstand how poor hdd IOPs are and how much latency 4k random reads induce.

Random IO can be 100 to 200 times slower than sequential reads on small file workloads.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#249

Post by wilg » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:10 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #45

snet0 wrote: post #16

> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel wi…

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it. If they were on the ho…

I mean its not really a cost to anyone. Bandwidth is paid for by Valve, games can be deleted locally, etc.

Re: Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

#250

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #122

account42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

23 GiB can be cached entirely in RAM on higher end gaming rigs these days. 154 GiB probably does not fit into many player's RAM when you still want something left for the OS and game. Reducing how much needs to be loaded from slow storage is itself an I/O speedup and HDDs are not that bad at seeking that you need to go to extreme lengths to avoid it entirely. The only place where such duplication to ensure linear rea…

They used "industry data" to make performance estimations: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394... > 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.

They claim they were following industry standard recommendation.

Or, you know, they just didn't really understand industry recommendations or what they were doing.

"Turns out our game actually spends most of its loading time generating terrain on the CPU" is not something you accidentally discover, and should have been known before they even thought about optimizing the game's loading time, since optimizing without knowing your own stats is not optimizing, and they wrote the code that loads the game!

Keep in mind this is the same team that accidentally caused instantly respawning patrols in an update about "Balancing how often enemy patrols spawn", the same group that couldn't make a rocket launcher lock on for months while blaming "Raycasts are hard", and released a mech that would shoot itself if you turned wrong, and spent the early days insisting that "The game is supposed to be hard" as players struggled with enemy armor calculations that would punish you for not shooting around enemy armor because it was calculating the position of that armor incorrectly, and tons of other outright broken functionality that have made it hard to play the game at times.

Not only do Arrowhead have kind of a long history of technical mediocrity (Magicka was pretty crashy on release, and has weird code even after all the bugfixes), but they also demonstrably do not test their stuff very well, and regularly release patches that have obvious broken things that you run into seconds into starting play, or even have outright regressions suggesting an inability to do version control.

"We didn't test whether our game was even slow to load on HDD in the first place before forcing the entire world to download and store 5x the data" is incompetence.

None of this gets into the utterly absurd gameplay decisions they have made, or the time they spent insulting players for wanting a game they spent $60 on to be fun and working.