Arrowhead Game Studios has released a new beta build for Helldivers 2 on PC that slashes the install size from roughly 154GB to just 23GB. The reduction eliminates about 131GB of data without cutting any actual game content.
The massive size decrease comes from removing duplicate assets that Arrowhead had scattered throughout the game files. This duplication was a deliberate choice at launch to optimize loading times for players running the game from traditional hard disk drives.
In order to streamline loading on older storage types, weapon models, terrain meshes, and textures would be duplicated multiple times so they could be loaded quickly, instead of including them once to reference back to many times. Each mission or environment had its own copies of frequently used data stored nearby on disk, minimizing the back-and-forth movement of an HDD’s mechanical read head.
As Helldivers 2 received updates over the past year, every new weapon, enemy type, and planet added more duplicated data. The PC build ballooned to over 150GB while console versions remained much smaller.
Arrowhead recently tested the game without asset duplication and found the HDD optimization wasn’t worth the storage cost. Load times on mechanical drives only increased by a few seconds in worst-case scenarios, and as 90% of players were using an SSD already, it didn’t make sense to optimize it slightly for a shrinking pool of players.
Arrowhead worked with Nixxes Software on the project. Nixxes, a Sony-owned studio specializing in PC ports and optimization, had already contributed to Helldivers 2‘s Xbox version and was familiar with the game’s technical structure.
How to get the slim build
The slim version is available as an opt-in beta on Steam. Players can select the “slim” beta branch in the game’s properties menu under the Betas tab.
Arrowhead recommends uninstalling the current version and doing a clean reinstall with the beta selected rather than patching from 154GB to 23GB, as the update process reportedly takes longer than starting fresh. New players can download the slim build directly without ever installing the bloated version.
