Helldivers 2 file size shrinks by 85% from 154GB to just 23GB on PC thanks to Nixxes' help

Arrowhead and Nixxes have massively reduced Helldivers 2's file size on PC from 154GB to just 23GB.

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Helldivers 2 players on PC have some great news from the devs: Your install size is about to get a lot smaller. Arrowhead has released a new test build that shrinks the game's total file size by an astronomical -85%, dropping down to the low 20GBs in size. The studio says that this storage reduction was made possible by nixing all duplicated data within Helldivers 2's files.

Interestingly enough, this adjustment was expected to cause even longer loading times for users launching Helldivers 2 from hard disk drives--which Arrowhead notes is a small proportion of players. Apparently, the shrink only added a "few seconds in the worst cases" to mission load screens.

Gamers can try out the so-called slim version of Helldivers 2 by right clicking on the game in Steam, then selecting Properties, and then go to the Betas tab to opt into the prod_slim - 001.005 build,

Check below for details from Arrowhead:

We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content.

While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions.

We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%).

We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases.