Helldivers requires a lot of storage space on PC: A developer explains who is to “blame”: Players who still use hard drives for their games. Because hard drives present a huge performance bottleneck for the game.
Those who want to install Helldivers 2 on their PC via Steam will need quite a bit of storage space. Console players can rejoice, as the popular shooter is much smaller on the Xbox Series X/S and PS5.
Brendan Armstrong, deputy technical director at Arrowhead Game Studios, explained in a post on Reddit why the game is so large and takes a long time to update: Many PC players still rely on outdated hard drives.
Outdated hard drives are a “significant performance bottleneck” for Helldivers 2
This is what the developer says: Armstrong stated in the post that some PC players still use hard drives (HDD) instead of solid-state drives (SSD). Essentially, Arrowhead duplicates a lot of information so that the game loads faster for those with hard drives. Otherwise, all other players on the team would have to wait for those with the slow hard drive, which wouldn’t be very helpful.
A hard drive 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. The time this arm takes to ‘seek’ or move to the right spot is a significant performance bottleneck.
To solve this problem, we consciously duplicate certain files (like a common tree texture or sound effect) and place copies of them physically close to the location where they are needed in the game. Our build system ensures, for instance, that a copy of a tree texture is stored on the same part of the hard drive as the level geometry data.
When the game loads the level, the read head can access all necessary information in a single, continuous pass without having to ‘seek’ elsewhere. This greatly speeds up loading times.
How many players are we talking about? The developer explains that the team cannot say for sure how many players still have a hard drive in their PC. A very rough estimate, according to Armstrong, is about 12%. If we take the peak number of players on February 24, 2024 according to SteamDB, where 458,709 players were reportedly online at the same time, that would mean between 45,000 and 50,000 players.
Meanwhile, Helldivers 2 has launched on Xbox. And the players of Helldivers 2 have actually sworn to confront the new players from Xbox with the harsh reality and show them what the game is really like. But as the first reports show, the steel warriors actually have a warm heart: Many veterans of Helldivers 2 actually wanted to see the newcomers from Xbox left in the dirt, but the opposite has happened
