‘There are no easy solutions’: Helldivers 2 dev explains why PC version needs 3x more storage than consoles
Because consoles run the game on SSD drives, there’s no need to cater for slower read speeds
A Helldivers 2 developer has explained to players why the PC version of the game takes up around three times more storage space than the console versions.
In a lengthy ‘tech blog’ posted on the game’s official Reddit page, Arrowhead Game Studios deputy technical director Brendan Armstrong explained why the 150GB install size on PC is triple that on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and why there’s no easy fix yet.
Armstrong explained that the main reason for this is to cater for players who still use mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) to play their games, and the need to duplicate content to improve loading speeds for them.
“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,” he wrote. “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.
“When the game loads the level, the read head can access all the necessary information in a single, continuous sweep, without having to ‘seek’ to a different location. This dramatically speeds up loading times.”
Most high-end PCs and all modern consoles now use solid state drives (SSDs) which have no moving parts, this is no longer an issue because ‘seek time’ is virtually instant. “This is one of the key reasons why new games often explicitly require an SSD in their minimum system specifications,” Armstrong said.
Noting that whether the PC version should continue to optimise for HDD users is “the six million dollar question”, Armstrong said the problem was that HDDs are part of the game’s minimum spec PC requirements and there’s currently no way of accurately determining how many players still use one (Arrowhead’s “very unreliable” estimates put it at around 12% of PC players).
He also explained that the solution isn’t as simple as removing duplicated assets and just giving HDD players longer loading times, as the studio “cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower, and we do not feel that this is acceptable”.
He also notes that such changes would affect all players, not just PC HDD users, because when a squad drops into a mission all players have to wait until everyone has loaded the game before it can begin.
Another potential solution to make hi-res 4K textures optional for SDD users has also been rejected for now, because while Armstrong says “anything is possible” he also notes that this isn’t natively supported in the game’s engine and would be “a substantial project” to implement.
Instead, the team is working on a three-stage plan to resolve the issue, starting with the next update which has removed some unused assets and other issues. “You will not likely notice them because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains,” Armstrong warned. “It’s not a game-changer but at least the install size will stop growing.”
Further reading
Beyond this the team is “exploring taking some of the worst offenders in terms of duplication and de-duplicating them by putting them in ‘very common assets’ bundles which will always be loaded under set conditions (e.g. specific faction/biome)”.
“This does mean that loading times will get a bit worse for players using mechanical HDDs – it is unfortunate but unavoidable,” Armstrong said. “Our early testing shows we should be able to keep this in the range of ‘less than 30 seconds’ rather than ‘several minutes’.”
Longer term, Arrowhead plans to make improvements to the engine which will make RAM use less wasteful, but beyond that Armstrong warns that “the remaining work is a bigger, riskier, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to the game data and potentially replicate some of the de-duplication we do on consoles”.
Summarising, Armstrong said the team was taking player concerns seriously but “there are no easy solutions”, and that “until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we’re all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time”.
“We’ve clearly reached the limits of how much duplicated data is acceptable so smarter solutions and compromises are now required.,” he concluded. “We are very carefully weighing up the costs and trade-offs of the options we have, and we’ll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon.”
