Helldivers 2’s new ‘slim’ version saves 131GB of space on your drive

If you’ve been short on storage on your PC, the latest Helldivers 2 beta update might help. The developers said Tuesday they’ve managed to cut down the PC file size for Helldivers 2 by about 85 percent, freeing up enough space for at least one or two more large games.

“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.”

The reduction in file size should have a “minimal” impact on load times, “seconds at most,” the developers said. The original file size was significantly larger because the developers were duplicating game asset data to improve load times on mechanical HDDs, which they estimate about 11 percent of Helldivers 2 players are currently using.

However, as the post on the update explains, the developers now know that load times in Helldivers 2 are mainly due to level generation, not loading game assets, so duplicating asset data was offering minimal benefit and impacting a small percentage of players (while making the file size larger for everyone).

Anyone with the PC version of Helldivers 2 can opt-in for the technical public beta on Steam to get the “slim” version of the game, which will eventually become the default version after the developers iron out any remaining issues that come up in beta testing.