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.
"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."
I remember when Starfield's minimum specs were announced, and the game required an SSD to run. At the time my desktop was still creaking along on an HDD (I've since upgraded) and I was fuming at what seemed like an arbitrary restriction. But as Armstrong explains, this "seek" time is "one of the key reasons why new games often explicitly require an SSD in their minimum system specifications."
Then the "the six million dollar question”—should Arrowhead continue to cater to players on HDDs (yes) or leave them behind in favour of optimising the experience for the SSD gigachads? He says the studio doesn't actually know how much of the playerbase are using HDDs but a "very unreliable" guesstimate would be 12%. Which is still an awful lot of Helldivers.
Armstrong goes on to outline some potential fixes and then explain why they wouldn't work, which is the kind of flex you expect from a deputy technical director. Removing the duplicated assets and giving HDD players longer loading times? Arrowhead "cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower, and we do not feel that this is acceptable." This would also make everyone's mission loading times longer.
Making 4K textures optional? "A substantial project" because the game wasn't built with this in mind. Though "anything is possible" says Armstrong, in that way where you know it's never gonna happen.
But don't start signing up to the Communist Party just yet. Armstrong says Arrowhead has taken steps so "the install size will stop growing" and 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 will increase loading times for those on HDDs ("unfortunate but unavoidable”) but not by too much.
So now you know. Armstrong promises "a better balance between loading times and installation size soon" but this is not a problem that's going away. "There are no easy solutions” concludes Armstrong, and "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."
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