The negativity towards this is wild. A company followed relatively widely accepted industry practice (lots and lots of other games also have huge sizes on disk for the exact same reason), then eventually they decided to do their own independent testing to check whether said common practice actually makes things better or not in their case, found that it didn't, so they reversed it. In addition, they wrote up some nice technical articles on the topic, helping to change the old accepted industry wisdom.
This seems great to me. Am I crazy? This feels like it should be Hacker News's bread and butter, articles about "we moved away from Kubernetes/microservices/node.js/serverless/React because we did our own investigation and found that the upsides aren't worth the downsides" tend to do really well here. How is this received so differently?
Arrowhead probably deserves more love for breaking the norm but I think it's overshadowed by people finding out for the first time the reason HDDs are so common in gaming setups is companies have been blindly shaving a few seconds off HDD load time off at the cost of 7x the disk space.
If it had been more well known this was the cause of game bloat before then this probably would have been better received. Still, Arrowhead deserves more credit both for testing and breaking the norm as well as making it a popular topic.
Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD.
154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.
Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?
My immediate question is that if all of that was on-disk data duplication, why did it affected download size? Can't small download be expanded into optimal layout on the client side?
It would be one thing if it was a 20% increase in space usage, or if the whole game was smaller to start with, or if they had actually checked to see how much it assisted HDD users.
But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?
It's kind of exemplary of HD2's technical state in general - which is a mix of poor performance and bugs. There was a period where almost every other mission became impossible to complete because it was bugged.
The negativity is frustration boiling over from years of a bad technical state for the game.
I do appreciate them making the right choice now though, of course.
It was a choice, not an oversight. They actively optimised for HDD users, because they believed that failing to do so could impact load times for both SSD and HDD users. There was no speed penalty in doing so for SSD users, just a disk usage penalty.
Helldivers II was also much smaller at launch than it is now. It was almost certainly a good choice at launch.
>But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?
Have you never worked in an organization that made software?
Damn near everything can be 10x as fast and using 1/10th the resources if someone bothered to take the time to find the optimizations. RARE is it that something is even in the same order of magnitude as its optimum implementation.
This is a mischaracterization of the optimization. This isn't a standard optimization that games apply everywhere. It's an optimization for spinning disks that some games apply sometimes. They're expected to measure if the benefits are worth the cost. (To be clear, bundling assets is standard. Duplicating at this level is not.)
This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:
1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game.
Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.
2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.
I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.
At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.
> When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.
> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.
I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer.
It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.
It's because shitting on game devs is the trendy thing these days, even among more technically inclined crowds unfortunately. It seems like there's a general unwillingness to accept that game development is hard and you can't just wave the magic "optimize" wand at everything when your large project is also a world of edge cases. But it seems like it should be that simple according to all the armchair game devs on the internet.
The level of work that goes into even “small” games is pretty incredible. When I was a grad student another student was doing their (thesis based, research focused) masters while working at EA on a streetfighter(?) game.
The game programming was actually just as research focused and involved as the actual research. They were trying to figure out how to get the lowest latency and consistency for impact sounds.
the engineers disease: "i'm smarter than you and I need to prove it, and we're so smart we wouldn't have shipped this code in the first place" bla bla bla
also keep in mind that modern gaming generates more revenue than the movie industry, so it's in the interests of several different parties to denigrate or undermine any competing achievement -- "Bots Rule Every Thing Around Me"
For me it's not so much about shitting on game devs as it is about shitting on the ogres that run game companies. Any of us who have done development should understand we have little control over scope and often want to do more than the business allows us to.
Meh, the same is true for almost every discussion on the internet, everyone is an expert armchair for whatever subject you come across, and when you ask them about their experience it boils down to "I read lots of Wikipedia articles".
I mean I agree with you, that it is trendy and seemingly easy, to shit on other people's work, and at this point it seems to be a challenge people take up upon themselves, to criticise something in the most flowery and graphic way as possible, hoping to score those sweet internet points.
Since maybe 6-7 years I stopped reading reviews and opinions about newly launched games completely, the internet audience (and reviewers) are just so far off base compared to my own perspective and experience that it have become less than useless, it's just noise at this point.
There has long been a trend that "software engineers" and "computer scientists" both have been rather uninterested in learning the strategies that gaming developers use.
Really, the different factions in software development are a fascinating topic to explore. Add embedded to the discussion, and you could probably start fights in ways that flat out don't make sense.
Many players perceive Arrowhead as a pretty incompetent and untrustworthy developer. Helldivers has suffered numerous issues with both performance and balancing. The bugs constantly introduced into the game (not the fun kind you get to shoot with a gun) have eroded a lot of trust and good will towards the company and point towards a largely non-existent QA process.
I won’t state my own personal views here, but for those that share the above perspective, there is little benefit of the doubt they’ll extend towards Arrowhead.
The negativity comes from the zero effort they put into this prior to launch. Forcing people to download gigs of data that was unnecessary.
Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used but its still up to the developers to make sure their assets are reusable as to cut down on size.
This is why Star Citizen has been in development for 15 years. They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.
The anger here is real. The anger here is justified. I'm sick of having to download 100gb+ simply because a studio is too lazy and just packed up everything they made into a bundle.
> They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.
Reminds me of the Crack.com interview with Jonathan Clark:
Adding to the difficulty of the task, our artist had no experience in the field. I remember in a particular level we wanted to have a dungeon. A certain artist begin by creating a single brick, then duplicating it several thousand times and building a wall out of the bricks. He kept complaining that his machine was too slow when he tried to render it. Needless to say this is not the best way to model a brick wall.
There were 20 people working on this game when they started development. Total. I think they expanded to a little over 100. This isn't some huge game studio that has time to do optimization.
The negativity wasn't created in a vacuum. ArrowHead has a long track record of technical mishaps and a proven history of erasing all evidence about those issues, without ever trying to acknowledge them. Reddits, Discord and YouTube comment section are heavily moderated. I suspect there's might be a 3rd party involved in this, which doesn't forward any technical issues, if the complaint involves any sign of frustration. Even the relation with their so called "Propaganda Commanders" (official moniker for their youtube partner channels) has been significantly strained in two cases, for trivialities.
It took Sony's intervention to actually pull back the game into playable state once - resulting in the so called 60 day patch.
Somehow random modders were able to fix some of the most egregiously ignored issues (like an enemy type making no sound) quickly and effectively. ArrowHead ignored, then denied, then used the "gamers bad" tactic, banned people pointing it out. After long time, finally fixing it and trying to bury it in the patch notes too.
They also have been caught straight up lying about changes, most recent one was: "Apparently we didn't touch the Coyote", where they simply buffed enemies resistance to fire, effectively nerfing the gun.
Sony nearly killed all good will the game had accrued when they tried to use the massive player base as an opportunity to force people into their worthless ecosystem. I don't think Sony even has the capability to make good technical decisions here, they are just the publisher. It was always Arrowhead trying to keep up with their massive success that they clearly weren't prepared for at all. In the beginning they simply listened to some very vocal players' complaints, which turned out to not be what the majority actually wanted. Player driven development is hardly ever good for a game.
> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."
The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung.
Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all features a native app can, without things like CORS, permission popups, browser extensions or god knows what else getting in your way.
But it should always be a prototype and eventually be shifted to native applications because in the end, unlike Internet Explorer in its heyday which you could trivially embed as ActiveX and it wouldn't lead to resource gobbling, if you now have ten apps consuming 1GB RAM each just for the Electron base to run, now the user runs out of memory because it's like PHP - nothing is shared.
I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their game to be as popular as it's become, and I think we're still inheriting flaws from the surprise interest in the game. (some of this plays out in the tug of war between the dev team's hopes for a realistic grunt fantasy vs. and the player base's horde power fantasy.)
The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game.
When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.
Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
All other games from the same studio have the same features.
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
I think it has the best explosions in any game I've played too. They're so dang punchy. Combined with their atmospheric effects (fog and dust and whatnot) frantic firefights with bots look fantastic.
It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.
A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes.
The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others.
The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire rates and stealth is an option in the game. The game has a decent community and people friendly for the most part, it also has the "feature" of being able to be played for about 20-40 minutes and you can just put it down again for a bit and come back.
The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.
considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense.
People make much more smooth and complex experiences in old engines.
You need to know your engine as a dev and dont cross its limits at the costs of user-experiences and then blame your tools....
The whole story about more data making load times better is utter rubbish. Its a sign of pisspoor resource management and usage. For the game they have, they should have realized a 130GB install is unacceptable. It's not like they have very elaborate environments. A lot of similar textures and structures everywhere.. its not like its some huge unique world like The Witcher or such games...
There is an astronomical amount of information available for free on how to optimise game engines, loads of books, articles, courses.
How much money do you think they have made so far?
"Arrowhead Game Studios' revenue saw a massive surge due to Helldivers 2, reporting around $100 million in turnover and $76 million in profit for the year leading up to mid-2025, significantly increasing its valuation and attracting a 15.75% investment from Tencent"
75 million in profit but can't figure out how to optimise a game engine. get out.
Oh my, I loved that game! It's wild everyone's throwing shade at Helldivers whilst ignoring that it was an massive success because of how fun it is. I've said it before, Dev's are really bad at understanding the art of making Fun experiences.
This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid off, and of course there is always 100s of more important tasks to do before launching a game, but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.
>but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.
More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)
The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game.
As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.
> depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing
That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.
You put the nail on the head with the first Pokémon, but Helldivers 2 is an order of magnitude smaller in the amateur-to-success ratio.
Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise.
Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.
My takeaway is that it seems like they did NO benchmarking of their own before choosing to do all that duplication. They only talk about performance tradeoff now that they are removing it. Wild
It's an valid issue, those of us who worked back in the day on GD/DVD,etc games really ran into bad loading walls if we didn't duplicate data for straight streaming.
Data-sizes has continued to grow and HDD-seek times haven't gotten better due to physics (even if streaming probably has kept up), the assumption isn't too bad considering history.
It's a good that they actually revisited it _when they had time_ because launching a game, especially a multiplayer one, will run into a lot of breaking bugs and this (while a big one, pun intended) is still by most classifications a lower priority issue.
I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed.
I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.
They admitted to testing nothing, they just [googled it].
To be fair, the massive install size was probably the least of the problems with the game, it's performance has been atrocious, and when they released for xbox, the update that came with it broke the game entirely for me and was unplayable for a few weeks until they released another update.
In their defense, they seem to have been listening to players and have been slowly but steadily improving things.
Playing Helldivers 2 is a social thing for me where I get together online with some close friends and family a few times a month and we play some helldivers and have a chat, aside from that period where I couldn't play because it was broken, it's been a pretty good experience playing it on Linux; even better since I switched from nvidia to AMD just over a week ago.
I'm glad they reduced the install size and saved me ~130GB, and I only had to download about another 20GB to do it.
Performance profiling should be built into the engine and turned on at all times. Then this telemetry could be streamed into a system that tracks it across all builds, down to a specific scene. It should be possible to click a link on the telemetry server and start the game at that exact point.
>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
>We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
On the flip side I don't remember who did it, but basically extracting textures on disk fixed all the performance issues UE5 has on some benchmarks(sorry for being vague, but I can't find the source material right now). But their assumption is in fact a sound one.
Non-made up numbers from Vermintide 2 (same engine): On PS4 when an optimized build took around 1.5 minutes to boot to main menu, the unoptimized version would take 12-15 minutes [1]. A different benchmark than SSD vs HDD, but shows that the optimization was certainly needed at the time.
Though the PS4 was partially to blame as well, with it's meagre 5400 RPM spinny drive.
For their newer instalment, Fatshark went with a large rework of the engine's bundle system, and players on HDDs are complaining about long loading times expectedly. That game is still large at ~80GB, but not from duplication.
It's pretty standard to do that duplication for games on CD/DVD because seek times are so long. It probably just got carried over as the "obviously correct" way of doing things, since HDDs are like DVDs if you squint a bit
You can't bench your finished game before it exists and you don't really want to rock the boat late in dev, either.
It was a fundamentally sound default that they revisited. Then they blogged about the relatively surprising difference it happen to make in their particular game. As it turns out the loading is CPU bound anyway, so while the setting is doing it's job, in the context of the final game, it happens to not be the bottle neck.
There's also the movement away from HDD and disc drives in the player base to make that the case as well.
It's very easy to accidentally get misleading benchmarking results in 100 different ways, I wouldn't assume they did no benchmarking when they did the duplication.
They used industry data to make the decision first to avoid potential multi minute load times for 10% or do of their players, hard to test all kinds of pc configurations. Now they have telemetry showing that it doesn't matter because another parallel task takes about as much time anyway.
Maybe it's changed a lot statistically in the last few years but for long time PC gamers used to have the mantra of small SSD for the OS and large HDD for games if they're price conscious so I could see that being assumed to be much more normal during development.
So in the worst case when everything is loaded at once (how on a system with < 32Gb RAM?) it takes 4 minutes.
Considering GTA whatever version could sit for 15 minutes at the loading screen because nobody bothered to check why - the industry could really say not to bother.
The good old "studios don't play their own games" strikes again :P
Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware. That will quickly teach them the value of fixing stuff like this and optimising the game in general.
I've worked in games for close to 15 years, and every studio I've worked on we've played the game very regularly. My current team every person plays the game at least once a week, and more often as we get closer to builds.
In my last project, the gameplay team played every single day.
> Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware
How would playing on middle of the road hardware have caught this? The fix to this was to benchmark the load time on the absolute bottom end of hardware, with and without the duplicated logic. Which you'd only do once you have a suspicion that it's going to be faster if you change it...
They could have been lying I guess but I listened to a great podcast about the development of Helldivers 2 (I think it was gamemakers notebook) and one thing that was constantly brought up was as they iterated they forced a huge chunk of the team to sit down and play it. That’s how things like diving from a little bit too high ended up with you faceplanting and rag-dolling, tripping when jet packing over a boulder that you get a little too close to, etc. They found that making it comically realistic in some areas led to more unexpected/emergent gameplay that was way more entertaining. Turrets and such not caring if you’re in the line of fire was brought up I believe.
That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.
I was curious if they optimized the download. Did it download the 'optimized' ~150 GB and wasting a lot of time there or did it download the ~20 GB unique data and duplicated as part of the installation.
I still don't know but found instead an interesting reddit post were users found and analyzed this "waste of space" three month ago.
If this article was exciting for you, I also highly recommend this one. A random dude fixed a bug in GTA 5 that was the root cause of it loading insanely slowly since the game came out!
This isn't unique to games, and it's not just "today". Go back a decade [0] find people making similar observations about one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
And that's consumer apps, having only glimpsed in the world of back-end / cloud shenanigans, there's heaps of data being generated and stored in datacenters. Useful data? Dunno, how useful are all access logs ever?
But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
WebDevs who have build systems that take ten minutes and download tens of megabytes of JS and have hundreds of milliseconds of lag are sooooooooooooo not allowed to complain about game devs ever.
Readit News
This seems great to me. Am I crazy? This feels like it should be Hacker News's bread and butter, articles about "we moved away from Kubernetes/microservices/node.js/serverless/React because we did our own investigation and found that the upsides aren't worth the downsides" tend to do really well here. How is this received so differently?
If it had been more well known this was the cause of game bloat before then this probably would have been better received. Still, Arrowhead deserves more credit both for testing and breaking the norm as well as making it a popular topic.
154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.
Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?
But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?
It's kind of exemplary of HD2's technical state in general - which is a mix of poor performance and bugs. There was a period where almost every other mission became impossible to complete because it was bugged.
The negativity is frustration boiling over from years of a bad technical state for the game.
I do appreciate them making the right choice now though, of course.
Helldivers II was also much smaller at launch than it is now. It was almost certainly a good choice at launch.
Have you never worked in an organization that made software?
Damn near everything can be 10x as fast and using 1/10th the resources if someone bothered to take the time to find the optimizations. RARE is it that something is even in the same order of magnitude as its optimum implementation.
This doesn't advance accepted industry wisdom because:
1. The trade-off is very particular to the individual game. Their loading was CPU-bound rather than IO-bound so the optimization didn't make much difference for HDDs. This is already industry wisdom. The amount of duplication was also very high in their game.
2. This optimization was already on its way out as SSDs take over and none of the current gen consoles use HDDs.
I'm not mad at Arrowhead or trying to paint them negatively. Every game has many bugs and mishaps like this. I appreciate the write-up.
When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.
Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.
This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.
It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.
The game programming was actually just as research focused and involved as the actual research. They were trying to figure out how to get the lowest latency and consistency for impact sounds.
also keep in mind that modern gaming generates more revenue than the movie industry, so it's in the interests of several different parties to denigrate or undermine any competing achievement -- "Bots Rule Every Thing Around Me"
I mean I agree with you, that it is trendy and seemingly easy, to shit on other people's work, and at this point it seems to be a challenge people take up upon themselves, to criticise something in the most flowery and graphic way as possible, hoping to score those sweet internet points.
Since maybe 6-7 years I stopped reading reviews and opinions about newly launched games completely, the internet audience (and reviewers) are just so far off base compared to my own perspective and experience that it have become less than useless, it's just noise at this point.
Really, the different factions in software development are a fascinating topic to explore. Add embedded to the discussion, and you could probably start fights in ways that flat out don't make sense.
I won’t state my own personal views here, but for those that share the above perspective, there is little benefit of the doubt they’ll extend towards Arrowhead.
Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used but its still up to the developers to make sure their assets are reusable as to cut down on size.
This is why Star Citizen has been in development for 15 years. They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.
The anger here is real. The anger here is justified. I'm sick of having to download 100gb+ simply because a studio is too lazy and just packed up everything they made into a bundle.
Reminds me of the Crack.com interview with Jonathan Clark:
Adding to the difficulty of the task, our artist had no experience in the field. I remember in a particular level we wanted to have a dungeon. A certain artist begin by creating a single brick, then duplicating it several thousand times and building a wall out of the bricks. He kept complaining that his machine was too slow when he tried to render it. Needless to say this is not the best way to model a brick wall.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160125143707/http://www.loonyg...
GTA5 had well over 1000 people on its team.
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It took Sony's intervention to actually pull back the game into playable state once - resulting in the so called 60 day patch.
Somehow random modders were able to fix some of the most egregiously ignored issues (like an enemy type making no sound) quickly and effectively. ArrowHead ignored, then denied, then used the "gamers bad" tactic, banned people pointing it out. After long time, finally fixing it and trying to bury it in the patch notes too.
They also have been caught straight up lying about changes, most recent one was: "Apparently we didn't touch the Coyote", where they simply buffed enemies resistance to fire, effectively nerfing the gun.
Many would consider this a bare minimum rather than something worthy of praise.
The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung.
Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all features a native app can, without things like CORS, permission popups, browser extensions or god knows what else getting in your way.
But it should always be a prototype and eventually be shifted to native applications because in the end, unlike Internet Explorer in its heyday which you could trivially embed as ActiveX and it wouldn't lead to resource gobbling, if you now have ten apps consuming 1GB RAM each just for the Electron base to run, now the user runs out of memory because it's like PHP - nothing is shared.
When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.
Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others.
The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire rates and stealth is an option in the game. The game has a decent community and people friendly for the most part, it also has the "feature" of being able to be played for about 20-40 minutes and you can just put it down again for a bit and come back.
People make much more smooth and complex experiences in old engines.
You need to know your engine as a dev and dont cross its limits at the costs of user-experiences and then blame your tools....
The whole story about more data making load times better is utter rubbish. Its a sign of pisspoor resource management and usage. For the game they have, they should have realized a 130GB install is unacceptable. It's not like they have very elaborate environments. A lot of similar textures and structures everywhere.. its not like its some huge unique world like The Witcher or such games...
There is an astronomical amount of information available for free on how to optimise game engines, loads of books, articles, courses.
How much money do you think they have made so far?
"Arrowhead Game Studios' revenue saw a massive surge due to Helldivers 2, reporting around $100 million in turnover and $76 million in profit for the year leading up to mid-2025, significantly increasing its valuation and attracting a 15.75% investment from Tencent"
75 million in profit but can't figure out how to optimise a game engine. get out.
Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?
I do credit their sense of humor about it though.
More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)
I'm not sure having the support of Sony is that gold-standard imprint that people think it is.
As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.
That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.
Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise.
Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.
Data-sizes has continued to grow and HDD-seek times haven't gotten better due to physics (even if streaming probably has kept up), the assumption isn't too bad considering history.
It's a good that they actually revisited it _when they had time_ because launching a game, especially a multiplayer one, will run into a lot of breaking bugs and this (while a big one, pun intended) is still by most classifications a lower priority issue.
I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.
To be fair, the massive install size was probably the least of the problems with the game, it's performance has been atrocious, and when they released for xbox, the update that came with it broke the game entirely for me and was unplayable for a few weeks until they released another update.
In their defense, they seem to have been listening to players and have been slowly but steadily improving things.
Playing Helldivers 2 is a social thing for me where I get together online with some close friends and family a few times a month and we play some helldivers and have a chat, aside from that period where I couldn't play because it was broken, it's been a pretty good experience playing it on Linux; even better since I switched from nvidia to AMD just over a week ago.
I'm glad they reduced the install size and saved me ~130GB, and I only had to download about another 20GB to do it.
>We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in HELLDIVERS 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs.
they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.
They basically just made the numbers up. Wild.
The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.
"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."
So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.
The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"
The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"
For their newer instalment, Fatshark went with a large rework of the engine's bundle system, and players on HDDs are complaining about long loading times expectedly. That game is still large at ~80GB, but not from duplication.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/hxkh0x/comment/...
It was a fundamentally sound default that they revisited. Then they blogged about the relatively surprising difference it happen to make in their particular game. As it turns out the loading is CPU bound anyway, so while the setting is doing it's job, in the context of the final game, it happens to not be the bottle neck.
There's also the movement away from HDD and disc drives in the player base to make that the case as well.
Instead they did blindly did extra work and 6x’ed the storage requirement.
> multi minute load times
23Gb / 100mb / 60s = 3.92m
So in the worst case when everything is loaded at once (how on a system with < 32Gb RAM?) it takes 4 minutes.
Considering GTA whatever version could sit for 15 minutes at the loading screen because nobody bothered to check why - the industry could really say not to bother.
I don’t know about the Xbox, but on PS4 the hard drive was definitely not fast at all
>we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.
it had no serious or glaring impact to their bottom line.
thus it was the right call, and if they didn't bother to fix it they'd still be rolling in $$$$
Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware. That will quickly teach them the value of fixing stuff like this and optimising the game in general.
In my last project, the gameplay team played every single day.
> Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware
How would playing on middle of the road hardware have caught this? The fix to this was to benchmark the load time on the absolute bottom end of hardware, with and without the duplicated logic. Which you'd only do once you have a suspicion that it's going to be faster if you change it...
That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.
Pay 2000$ for indie games so studios could grow up without being beholden to shareholders and we could perhaps get that "perfect" QA,etc.
It's a fucking market economy and people aren't making pong level games that can be simply tuned, you really get what you pay for.
I still don't know but found instead an interesting reddit post were users found and analyzed this "waste of space" three month ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1mw3qcx/why_the...
PS: just found it. According to this Steam discussion it does not download the duplicate data and back then it only blew up to ~70 GB.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/discussions/0/43725019...
[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading#AppStructur...
282 comments
https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338
But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
This reminds me of the old days when I check who's using my PC memory every now and then.
they're a fantastically popular franchise with a ton of money... and did it without the optimizations.
if they never did these optimizations they'd still have a hugely popular, industry leading game
minor tweaks to weapon damage will do more to harm their bottom line compared to any backend optimization
That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
You never assume something is an optimization or needed and never do hypothetical optimizations
I can see why it would happen in this case though, gamedev is chaotic and you're often really pressed for time
Wow! It looks like I do indeed know better.