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HELLDIVERS 2 Tech Blog #2 - Opt-in install size reduction beta (from 154Gb to 23Gb) (store.steampowered.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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*We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. 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 (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!*

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[–] 16 points 11 months ago (13 children)

No the issue isn't with the user having a 400GB drive. The issue is the devs chose to leave 131GB of unnecessary duplication in the game artifacts when published. That is a fundamental problem with software in general but games especially.

Blaming the customer for expecting to have a decent product is laughably misplaced. Part of software being a decent product is it being optimized. This was an absolute failure and they should really be putting out an apology instead of patting themselves on the back.

It's great the game is so much smaller now but it should have been this new size at launch. Certainly not 131GB bigger than it needed to be.

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  • [+] -27 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    Cool, wanna go through the list of modern games and see their file sizes? COD is somewhere around 300GB. Anything AAA is usually 80-100gb.

    If all you have is a system capable of playing indie games, don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby. A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask. If you can't do that, fine. But don't drag the rest of us down with you.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby

    A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask

    This take is very telling of the privileged economic background you come from. Totally out of touch with the reality most of your fellow humans live in.

    I’ll be very surprised if you aren’t some white colonialist nepo-baby

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  • [+] -4 points 11 months ago* (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    I’m also white and have also technically benefited from colonialism, lol.

    The problem with yours and @fishos@lemmy.world line of thinking is that you are looking at that 90USD / 30USD through the lens of your own earning and buying power.

    For someone in your hypothetical “poor African country”, that may well be days or weeks of income.

    Both of you seem to be having a strong reaction to that statement, I get the impression I’ve struck a nerve and that you might be facing (and rejecting) an inconvenient truth.

    I’m sorry if it came across as an ‘attack’, that was not my intention. I’m not here to massage anyone’s feelings, and hopefully you’ll be able to take some time for reflection and personal growth.

    Ultimately, y’all in here simping for corps by excusing 100GB of inefficiency while getting down on “the poors” and it’s not a pretty look.

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  • [–] -3 points 11 months ago

    So you get racist af to prove your point? Fuck off twat and stop being a bitch. It's not unreasonable to put money into your hobby. That's what you do. You buy a game here and there, and you upgrade your hardware.

    What you don't do is bitch and moan that you can't keep up when the effort to do so isn't that much and at the end of the day, no one owes you AAA games. Cry harder. It's shit like this that makes gamers look like entitled bitches. You have it vastly better than any other time and you still take most of your time to bitch and moan.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    They need 15% of that space.

    It isn't about the drives or if people can afford a certain size SSD (although that matters more than you are admitting). It's about asking better of people and companies responsible for destroying over a decade of hardware advancement due to bad optimization (to save money), overly-abstracted frameworks (to save money), and improper handling of assets (to save money).

    They made a mistake in not prioritizing this, they fixed it and admitted there was a problem. That's good. What isn't good is people polishing their knobs as if the devs did this out of the goodness of their heart. They didn't, they were losing players because people were speaking with time and money. Just like you wanted. Just like people in this thread are doing.

    But glancing through your other replies I'll just stop here. May your drive space remain vast, and your tolerance for badly-optimized software remain stronger than mine.

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  • [+] -4 points 11 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Holy shit, ok I'll state it yet again and then I'm done. For the 3rd time, this isn't about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn't exist if that is easier because the drives don't matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue.

    This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments...they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed.

    Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It's how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn't even exist if these weren't legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn't have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn't a problem affecting their bottom line.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Bruh, this is a crazy, defensive rant. You're defending multi-million dollar companies who are bad at their jobs and blaming the consumer who is getting poorer and poorer every year. Using COD as an example for normal, a famously repetitive franchise game whose developer is corpo as hell is not a good look. How many people at that studio are getting paid a good wage even relative to industry standard and not suffering burnout and other bad practices. Helldiver's just proved that A) you can have something like 6x bloat for no reason which they themselves say will hardly impact HDDs B) this is largely technical incompetence as they vetted their initial assumptions and found them flawed.

    This isn't about them supporting HDD's, they said they'll barely be impacted. This is about a developer not knowing what they need to do to make a successful game and slowly figuring out what is unnecessary. If COD cared, they could lower it too.

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  • [+] -21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    Nah, it's just not 1995 anymore. I was around for those times bro. I know what computer tech used to be. I know what it is now. I've seen the progression. And yes, if you only have a 500GB hard drive today, you're the equivalent of someone trying use floppy disks.

    Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg.

    Sorry you're trying to game in modern times with an Atari, but again, that's a you problem. Maybe get a job and buy an SSD. Seriously, Samsung evo SSD 1tb are $90 right now. You're telling me you can afford $40-70 games, but can't buy a hard drive? Like seriously? You also try to play golf with old pieces of rebar and complain that it doesn't work either?

    Bunch of entitled people bitching that they're owed something. You're a consumer. They don't owe you shit. Don't like it, don't buy it. Vote with your wallets like we tried to tell you decades ago.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg.

    We are literally in a comment thread about how fancy graphics don't need to take up 100+ GB. Like, come on dude.

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