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

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

#261

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 11:17 PM UTC

canucker2016 wrote: post #215

Back in 2014, Titanfall's disk space was 75% UNCOMPRESSED audio (35GB of 48GB) for the gamers with only dual-core CPUs. from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-... “On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”

It's also bullshit. Half Life 2 didn't need uncompressed audio. MP3 decompression is damn near free.

Half life also did it with half the required minimum cores, and 1 ghz less clock speed on that CPU. It released a decade before Titanfall 1. Sure sure, it's got so much more going on, but uh, that much?

For a reference of how trivial it is for CPUs to decode MP3 files, software decoders take tens of MIPS. Remember that unit? Less than a percent of one of those minimum spec CPUs required.

You know what's funny? The source engine only supports MP3 compressed audio. Do you know what titanfall 1 downloads and decompresses to to create 30gb of audio data? Lossy compressed, 160kb/s OGG format audio.

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

#262

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 11:25 PM UTC

thatguy0900 wrote: post #85

miohtama wrote: post #38

AFAIK Helldivers 2 runs some really old engine which was discontinued many years ago. Not "state of the art." It's also a title that shows you can have a really good game without the latest tech.

You can, but on the other hand they've been battling bugs from it with every release. The game is notorious for breaking things constantly. I played for quite a while and the sound engine was always awful with things not in your line of sight frequently not making any noise at all, and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns…

Yeah but what evidence is there that what you describe is an engine problem rather than an Arrowhead can't software engineer problem?

As others point out, several other good games were made on this engine, and they do not have such abysmal engineering quality. Vermintide 2 is on the same engine and very much doesn't have problems with constant bugs and regressions.

Arrowhead struggled to fix the lock on for the missile launcher for months, and then claimed that "raycasts are hard* and I just don't think they should be for a game dev. Several patches seem to show that they just do not test at all the release build, and that they don't seem to have functioning version control to keep from breaking things they've already fixed.

>and every month or two a new major bug relating to host client desyncing is found out by the community who then has to have big campaigns badgering the devs to notice and fix it.

This is not a game engine problem. Does fire damage properly work across multiplayer yet?

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

#263

Post by k1tanaka » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:11 AM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #113

WreckVenom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the story: > Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect. It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and p…

Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only down…

I can't answer all of this questions, but "why not offer 2 versions and allow the user to choose" was mentioned here [0].

Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer game, for the game 2 start, everyone in the lobby needs the game to be fully loaded. If one person would choose to have a slower version, it would make everyone wait longer. Which is definitely not a trade off you are willing to make as a game developer because makes the experience for other players worse.

There could be other options and better optimizations, such as lower textures that you mentioned, but I agree with the developers on having only a "fast version".

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/helldivers-2-dev-explai...

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

#264

Post by qu4z-2 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:38 AM UTC

expedition32 wrote: post #227

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs. Maybe, kinda, sorta, on some games, on some spinning rust hard disks, if you held your hand just right and the Moon was real close to the cusp. If you're still using spinning rust in a PC that you attempt to run modern software on, please drop me a message. I'll send you a tenner so you can buy yourself an SSD…

The minimum requirement for new games is a SSD true. However a lot of people have TINY SSDs. Think 500 gigabyte.

So, big enough for a 25GB game but not a 150GB game? I will be amused if we get stats in the coming month that the percentage of users installing the game on a HDD has decreased from 11% to like 3% after they shrunk it.

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

#265

Post by qu4z-2 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:48 AM UTC

PunchyHamster wrote: post #151

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premature optimization doesn't mean "We have an obvious fix sitting in front of us that will definitely improve things." It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." So it doesn't save us from anything, it potentially delays launching and gives us the same result that product team…

> It means "We think we have something that could help performance based on a dubiously applicable idea, but we have no real workload to measure it on. But we're going to do it anyway." the problem is that it doesn't say that directly so people without experience take it at face value.

The commonly cited source says, when you take the entire sentence, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." and continues "Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

There's only so much you can do with people who will not even take the complete original sentence, let alone the context. (That said, "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" is much snappier so I do see why it's ended up being quoted in isolation)

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

#266

Post by TheJoeMan » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:02 AM UTC

deng wrote: post #59

ga2mer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam Steam compresses games as much as possible, so in the case of Helldivers 2, you had to download between ~30 and ~40 GB, which was then unpacked to 150 GB (according to SteamDB[0]) [0] https://steamdb.info/app/553850/depots/

You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... ). I still find these things…

Here’s a funny one from Halo Infinite network downloading the same picture thousands of times: https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/w5af08/infinite_downl...

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

#267

Post by tehjoker » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

WreckVenom wrote: post #230

y0ssar1an wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somehow they chose to build their very complicated live service game with the Autodesk Stingray engine which was discontinued in 2018! Helldivers 2 was released in 2024. https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview

Development of HellDivers 2 started in 2016. So they would have been 2 years into development with that engine. So they would have had to effectively start again in another engine.

Wow, that is a very long development cycle. It really shows in the level of polish this game has.

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

#268

Post by jjmarr » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:07 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #183

jjmarr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a common issue in industry why don't game devs make a user visible slider to control dedup? I have friends who play one or two games and want them to load fast. Others have dozens and want storage space.

Any developer could tell you that it's because that would be extra code, extra UI, extra localization, extra QA, etc. for something nonessential that could be ignored in favor of adding something that increases the chance of the game managing to break even.

Having a smaller install size makes me more likely to buy the game if I have a large library.

Game size is a problem in every new triple A release.

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

#269

Post by retrochameleon » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

wilg wrote: post #249

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…

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

Taking up 500% of the space than is necessary is a cost to me. I pay for my storage, why would I want it wasted by developer apathy?

I'm already disillusioned and basically done with these devs anyways. They've consistently gone the wrong direction over time. The game's golden age is far behind us, as far as I'm concerned.

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

#270

Post by Havoc » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:23 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #248

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.

It literally says in the article the effect was inconsequential

> 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.