Arrowhead Set to Repeat Helldivers 2’s Biggest Mistake by Axing HDD Support

Arrowhead dropped its first Tech Blog and, almost instantly, the Helldivers 2 community showed up with torches. The post tried to explain why the PC version eats roughly 150 GB while consoles sit around 50 GB. The short answer: hard drives. The long answer: it gets weird.

What set everyone off

Deputy Technical Director Brendan Armstrong laid out the logic: to keep load times workable on old-school mechanical HDDs, Helldivers 2 duplicates a ton of assets on PC. We are talking textures, audio, the works. More copies means less seeking on a spinning disk, which means faster loads. Sensible in theory, less fun when the install balloons to three times the size of the console build.

Some PC players immediately said the solution is obvious: stop supporting HDDs. Others fired back with a very pointed reminder of the PSN account-linking fiasco. That was the moment 'never leave a Helldiver behind' turned from a catchphrase into a line in the sand. Now those same players are being asked to strand about a tenth of the community in the name of file deduplication. You can see why it got tense.

The ironic twist

Here is the inside-baseball bit: by duplicating assets to help HDDs, Arrowhead created a new problem for SSD owners. If you are on a 256 GB SSD, you cannot donate half your drive to one game without feeling it. Plenty of players solved that by moving Helldivers 2 to their slower mechanical drives, which makes them the exact use case Arrowhead bulked up the install to support. Chef-kiss irony.

'We cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower' and 'do not feel that this is acceptable.'

That is the crux of it. Important clarification: removing duplication would not break the game on HDDs. It would just make loads way slower. And at this point in time, that might be a perfectly reasonable tradeoff.

Why HDD-first optimization probably has an expiration date

SSDs are no longer exotic. A decent 1 TB drive is under $60. Helldivers 2 is $39.99 and, if you take CEO Shams Jorjani at his word, it is meant to be a long-haul 'forever game.' Holding back the entire PC build for roughly 10–12% of players still on decade-old spinning disks is going to get harder to justify. Think 6 seconds vs 60 seconds for a load: inconvenient, not unplayable.

There is also precedent. CD Projekt Red raised the floor to SSD for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty post-launch. The sky did not fall. Players adapted. Studios can do this, as long as they explain it and give people time.

• Do not brick HDD installs, but stop the massive asset duplication that blows the game up to ~150 GB on PC.
• Accept longer loads on HDD while keeping the experience snappy on SSD, where most players already are.
• Claw back tens of gigabytes so SSD users do not have to evict half their library or shuffle the game to a slower drive.
• Set expectations early. If HDD-specific optimizations are getting sunset, say when and why to avoid another rug-pull moment.
• Let players choose if their hardware still cuts it instead of letting a small slice of the base dictate the technical direction for everyone else.

The rub

The PSN dust-up taught Arrowhead not to take away access from people who bought in good faith. Totally agree. But the current PC footprint has already forced a lot of players into awkward workarounds. In a roundabout way, the rug has been half-pulled already.

My read: keep HDDs functional, stop designing the whole build around them. Save the space, take the longer loads where they happen, and move on.

Where do you land? Prioritize the SSD majority, or keep optimizing for HDDs no matter the size hit? Tell me in the comments.