[WreckVenom]

From the story:

> Originally, the game’s large install size was attributed to optimization for mechanical hard drives since duplicating data is used to reduce loading times on older storage media. However, it turns out that Arrowhead’s estimates for load times on HDDs, based on industry data, were incorrect.

It wasn't a bug. They made a decision on what to optimise which was based on incomplete / incorrect data and performed the wrong optimisation as a result.

As a player of the game, I didn't really care that it took up so much space on my PC. I have 2TB dedicated for gaming.

[zelphirkalt]

Why not offer 2 versions for download and let the user choose, whether they want to block their whole disk with a single game, or accept a bit longer loading times? Or let the user at installation time make an informed decision by explaining the supposed optimization? Or let the user decide before downloading, what resolution (ergo textures) they want as the highest resolution they will play the game at and only download the textures they need up to that resolution?

Questions, questions, questions.

[WreckVenom]

Because all of these suggestions require developer resources. Doing a quick web search it is estimated they have ~150 employees. A lot of triple-A studios have thousands or ten of thousands of employees. So they are relatively small game studio.

Also note that they are adding more game modes, mode warbonds, and the game is multi-platform and multiplayer. The dev team is relatively small compared to other game studios.

The game engine the game is built in is discontinued and I believe is unsupported. IIRC they are rewriting the game in UE5 because of the issues with the unsupported engine.

A lot of people have problems with Arrowhead (there been some drama between Arrowhead and the community). The install size of the game while a problem wasn't like the top problem. Bigger issues in my mind as someone that plays the game regular is:

e.g.

- The newest updates to the game with some of new enemy types which are quite unfair to fight against IMO (Dragon Roach and the War Strider).

- The other complaint was performance/stability of the game was causing issues with streamers PCs. Some people claimed the game was breaking their PCs (I think this was BS and their PCs were just broken anyway). However there was a problem with performance in the game, which was resolved with a patch a few weeks ago. That greatly improved the game IMO.

[k1tanaka]

I can't answer all of this questions, but "why not offer 2 versions and allow the user to choose" was mentioned here [0].

Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer game, for the game 2 start, everyone in the lobby needs the game to be fully loaded. If one person would choose to have a slower version, it would make everyone wait longer. Which is definitely not a trade off you are willing to make as a game developer because makes the experience for other players worse.

There could be other options and better optimizations, such as lower textures that you mentioned, but I agree with the developers on having only a "fast version".

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/helldivers-2-dev-explai...

[ThrowawayTestr]

SSD or HDD?

[WreckVenom]

SSD. Prices got reasonable sometime last year for 2TB NVME/SSD