In a nutshell: As video games become larger, we welcome the news that Helldivers 2 has a new "slim" version that reduces its footprint by 85%. Instead of gobbling up an enormous 154 GB, the game's PC installation size will drop to just 23 GB.
Like many modern big releases, the huge amount of storage space taken up by Helldivers 2 has been a point of contention among players since launch.
But in a new post, developer Arrowhead Studios writes that it has been working toward the goal of pushing the installation size of Helldivers 2's PC version closer to the console versions, which are around 35GB after the post-launch updates.
Now, thanks to the help of Sony's PC-port specialist Nixxes, that goal has been achieved. Arrowhead said it has completed several rounds of internal QA and the new slimline version is now available as part of a public technical beta.
If you want to opt into this beta, right-click on Helldivers 2 in your Steam library, go to Properties, select the Betas tab, then select the "prod-slim" beta from the drop-down box. Close the dialog box and Helldivers 2 will update to the new version, giving you enough room for one or two extra games on your drive.
Arrowhead said the installation size reduction was achieved by completely de-duplicating the data. The company previously warned that changing the file size could increase the load times on mechanical hard drives by a factor of 10. But its worst-case predictions never came to pass.
Arrowhead says the previous loading time projections were based on industry data. It explained that the majority of the loading time in the game is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time, even for users with mechanical HDDs.
Around 11% of players actively playing Helldivers 2 last week were using mechanical HDDs, according to the post. These players may experience slightly longer load times with the slim version, but only a few seconds.
Once the beta has been confirmed to be bug-free, this slim version of Helldivers 2 will become the default version and roll out to everyone. The legacy version is set to be discontinued sometime next year.