Arrowhead Cuts Helldivers 2 PC Build from 154GB to 23GB

Helldivers 2 continues to be one of Sony’s biggest multiplayer triumphs, thriving across both PlayStation 5 and PC. Yet the PC version has carried a long-standing disadvantage that frustrated many players: an enormous storage footprint.

While the PS5 build remains modest in size, the PC edition once demanded as much as 150GB of free space, placing the game out of reach for players with limited storage.

Arrowhead Game Studios addressed the issue earlier in the year, explaining that the inflated size was due to heavy data duplication. The duplication helped maintain acceptable loading times for players still using HDDs, ensuring the game remained functional on older systems.

Approximately 11%of the PC player base still relies on HDDs, making performance parity a necessary, if cumbersome, design goal.

A Technical Breakthrough with Nixxes Software

Arrowhead has now confirmed that, with technical support from Nixxes Software, the studio has delivered a dramatically optimised PC build. The result is staggering: the new slimmer version comes in at just 23GB, reducing the file size by 85%.

The process was made possible after Arrowhead ran extensive performance tests tailored specifically to Helldivers 2. Contrary to earlier assumptions, the primary loading bottleneck was not asset streaming but level generation. This discovery allowed the team to restructure the game’s data far more efficiently.

The developers’ biggest concern was the potential impact on players using HDDs. According to Arrowhead, the more petite build introduces only a few seconds of additional loading time on these drives, a minimal compromise considering the scale of the reduction. SSD users will see virtually no difference at all.

Available Now in the Steam Beta Branch

Rather than immediately replacing the standard PC build, Arrowhead is exercising caution. The new version of Helldivers 2 is now available through Steam’s open beta testing branch, allowing the studio to gather performance data across a wide range of hardware configurations before rolling it out to the entire player base.

If the beta period proceeds smoothly, the 23GB Slim build will become the default Helldivers 2 PC version.