TLDR: Goto Steam, HD2 Properties, Betas, select Prod_slim from the drop down menu, then reinstall. Expect bugs and crashes.
154GB down to 23GB lol
Did they remove the folder with old debug builds from the setup?
No, they just had a fuckton of duplicate files so HDDs could load the maps faster.
Holy shit!? Maybe I can finally play it from my family library. I tried to install it just yesterday and gave up when I saw the size
These loading time projections were based on industry data
Good reminder that lots of industry “knowledge” is just as scientific as the story your great grandpa always used to tell about the war. So much stuff just gets established once and then never questioned again.
They also took the worst case predictions and then doubled them to be “conservative”.
Good, the install size was ridiculous and this will also increase the likelihood of other games who took a similar bloat approach for HDDs might double check their assumptions and possibly pare down their duplication as well.
not half as impressive as that guy that rewrote mario 64 engine to run at 60fps on a real n64. really this should be expected of big studios especially big sellers like helldivers
Kaze Emanuar! He has done some seriously cool stuff with the N64. Imagine if someone with his skills got their hands on literally any game as big as Helldivers.
every studio needs at least one person like him on the team and give them enough authority to not get fucked over by corporate
Best they can do is layoff when the game ships.
How is that 131GB in cuts?! If the game alone was 131GB I’d say that’s enough, but that’s just what they cut?
From reading the article (gasp!):
It looks like a large chunk of it was that they were optimizing their release for spinning disk hard drives (HDDs). With HDDs and optical media, there is a substantial impact on performance when you are fetching data that is physically close to the last data you looked at. So a common technique was to actually duplicate commonly used data.
As an example: You fight Tyranids on sandy and snowy planets. The assets for each of those planets are in different parts of the disc/install. But you’ll need those same bugs in each planet so… you also install the Tyranid assets alongside each planet’s assets for fast fetching.
This is ALSO why disk defragmentation used to be so important.
But if you are assuming that everyone has an SSD (or better), those access times are nowhere near as crippling and it is a lot easier to just install the assets once.
That should be an option they add, not something forced on every user. A lot games are just poorly made…
I can understand some duplication but they removed nearly 6 times the amount of data the actual game needs. It’s insane that this was published like that…
And it is not at all uncommon.
There is a reason that, back in the day, there were a LOT of ways to compress game installs so that you could burn it to a CD-R and so forth. And this was incredibly prevalent on consoles up until the current generation when SSDs became default… except that a lot of games were still being developed for previous gen and older hardware PCs.
When Blizzard made a big deal about how WoW now requires an SSD? It was for stuff like this.
I wonder why they even did that in the first place.
SSDs have been common in the PC space for a while, and this game didn’t come out for last-gen consoles like the PS4 who still shipped with spinning rust…
I remember once Fortnite did something similar and shaved the install size from 75 GB down to 30 GB or so. And now it’s mega bloated again…
Activision, Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar devs, please take note. Oh, and you too, ID Software. I don’t like Doom Eternal being 89 GB. At least Battlefield 6 is only 37 GB if you only have Multiplayer installed without the high-res textures.
Don’t forget Wildcard. Ark Survival is an absurd 200+ Gb monstrosity. And there is sooooo much duplicate data.
ark survival evolved being 203gb :/
Ark has always been a mess, nothing good to expect from this
With the DLCs it’s half a terabyte. The bloat is insane.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!!
This just reminds me of the absolute horror that was Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019). The entire thing, with Warzone (that you couldn’t uninstall, btw) was 250 fucking GB. Like, what the actual fuck?
I still wonder how the HELL I managed to play that game with nothing but a GTX 950, an FX-4300 processor, and 8 GB of RAM. Which, even for 2019, was an absolutely TERRIBLE computer.
Interesting, so it does load the data slower, it’s just that the world generation process runs in parallel and is even slower. Thus allowing loads of headroom for the data loading.
Every triple A game is made like ass and suffers the same bloated file size problem.
