“We take your concerns very seriously, but there is no simple solution” – Arrow explains why installing such a large size on a PC Why
Blog Andrew Joseph 04 Oct , 2025 0
Hell 2 Developer Arrowhead Studios still doesn't have a solution for gro mongoose installation size for shooting games on PC – but it's in use.
exist renew Earlier today, Brendan Armstrong, deputy technical director at Arrowhead, wrote to Steam in a series of posts to write the first article on the engineering team talking about the game’s “technical health” and “the technical challenges we are working on.”
Helldivers 2 admits that the installation size “seems to be a hot topic now” – at 150GB, the Helldivers 2 takes up three times the space on the PC as it does on the console.
“The main problem with mechanical HDDs is seeking time,” Armstrong explained. “The HDD stores data on a rotating plate, and the physical arm with a reading head must be moved on the plate to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for the arm to 'seew' or the time it takes to move to the correct position is a significant performance bottleneck.
“Imagine a large game level with various objects – trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data of these objects are scattered on hard drives, the read head has to jump around on disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”
This is why arrows deliberately copy certain data files (such as common tree textures or sound effects) and “place their copy physically close to where they are needed in the game.”
“A lot of the data in Helldivers 2 is repeated. The practice of copying data to reduce load time is a game development technique that is primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, especially discs like mechanical HDDs and DVDs,” the director explained. “For games deployed on solid-state drives (SSDs), this practice is largely unnecessary, which is why the console version of Helldivers 2 doesn't do that.”
That said, the post admits that with the advent of SSDs (storing data on flash chips without moving parts) it is almost non-existent, but it must be included as long as the mechanical HDD is part of the minimum specification PC requirements. Steam user survey “cannot provide data on mechanical HDD usage in the overall gamer population”, but Arrowhead's “best estimate” rated it at 12% of all PC gamers.
“It's hard to know how many players will affect by reducing the amount of data duplication until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs installed in Hell 2,” the post said. “Even if this number is small, remember that the load time for each player to fall into the task is determined by the slowest member of the team.”
While Arrowhead struggles to solve this problem and tries to get better data to understand the players they use mechanical HDDs, the team said that by sweeping out unused assets and “obvious issues”, this makes “some tiny gains in the next update”, but admits that we're unlikely to notice them because we'll add these new things and we'll add these benefits. ”
In the long run, the team will improve the engine to ensure that the game does not waste unwanted common data that is not needed.
“Other than that, the rest of the work is a bigger, more risky, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to game data and have the potential to replicate some of the deletion measures we did on the console,” the post concluded. “We don't know yet whether the impact of load time can make these methods unfeasible.”
“We take your concerns very seriously, but there is no simple solution. Until we live in a world we know that most PC players use SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space to ensure we all get the task done with reasonable time. We clearly hit our limits, and we have already paid a lot of limits. With it, we are sure to find a better balance between load time and installation size.”
Vikki Blake is an IGN journalist, as well as a critic, columnist and consultant with over 15 years of experience working with some of the world's largest gaming websites and publications. She is also a guardian, a Spartan, a quiet Hilan, a legend and a permanent chaos. Find her Bruceky.