Promises things will improve, but no quick fix.
Brendan Armstrong is a deputy technical director at Arrowhead Game Studios and has taken to the Helldivers 2 subreddit to explain something that’s always bothered me, but I didn’t know I needed the answer to. Why is Helldivers 2 roughly 150GB on PC, and around a third that size on consoles?
Armstrong says it’s all down to a proportion of the PC playerbase who still have hard disk drives (HDD) rather than solid-state drives (SSD). His full explanation follows but, essentially, Arrowhead duplicates a tonne of information in order to make the game load faster for those on HDDs (which matters because no match starts until all players have loaded the mission, regardless of hardware).
« An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data », says Armstrong (thanks, VGC). « The time it takes for this arm to ‘seek’ or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.
« To solve this problem, we deliberately duplicate certain data files (like a common tree texture or a sound effect) and place copies of them in physically close proximity to where they would be needed in the game. For example, our build system will ensure that a copy of a tree texture is stored on the same part of the disk as the level geometry data.
