In the realm of video game sizes getting more and more bloated year after year, it’s lovely to see the opposite happening.
In their wisdom, and with Nixxes’ support, Arrowhead Game Studios managed to go against all trends of gaming and animal kingdom, deciding to slim HELLDIVERS 2 down for the winter.
Shrinkflation but in a Good Way
By default, Helldivers 2 asks for a significant chunk of your storage, claiming about 154 gigabytes of space before it allows you to fight for the Super-Earth. However, thanks to technological wizardry and data de-duplication, Arrowhead managed to reduce the game’s size to about 23GB. This new format is currently only available as a public technical beta you can access through Steam.
All you need to do to access the Helldivers 2 slim beta is:
- Right-click on the installed HD2 in your library,
- Select “Properties”
- Go to “Betas”
- Select “Slim beta” from the drop-down menu.
And that’s it, lot of storage space suddenly free for whatever you want to fill it back up with.
Do remember, however, that it is still a beta, not a fully-fledged release, so you might encounter bugs and glitches. Loading times might be minimally different as well. If this sounds unacceptable to you, you probably shouldn’t opt into the Steam beta.
It’s still essentially the same game, this beta doesn’t take you to a separate server or anything like that, you keep all your progress and connections as they are. It’s just a for of performance optimization.
You can read the full update up on the game’s Steam blog right here.
It’s great to see the devs still working hard on making Helldivers 2 better not just in terms of content, but also technologically. The third-person, co-operative PvE shooter has claimed the hearts and mind of thousands with its satirical tone, excellent, polished gameplay, and an engaging metagame in the form of the Galactic War progression shaping the emergent narrative.