Sony is truly getting plenty of bang for its buck in regards to its ownership of developer Nixxes, as the studio has served up a ton of PC ports for its various PlayStation exclusives over the years. But this isn't all that the team is good for, as clearly they are technical wizards that can help other teams improve and refine their PC editions.
We say this as Helldivers II is shrinking in file size on PC by a lot. In a Steam blog post, it's mentioned that the file size is dropping by 85%, shrinking from 154GB to as little as 23GB, all because Arrowhead and Nixxes have teamed up and figured out an ingenious way to streamline the game and see its PC size better reflect the console versions.
For the tech wizards out there, it's mentioned that this has happened through a method known as de-duplicating its data, and the good news is that it shouldn't really impact performance of the game at all, unless you're one of the very few that still use a HDD to play the title.
We're told that this update will "result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most." The post goes on to add however that at worst the change will result in a five-times longer loading time difference between SSD and HDD versions of the game.
The post elaborates: "We now know that, contrary to most games, the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time. We now know that this is true even for users with mechanical HDDs."
So good news, PC players! Expect this change to come through relatively soon, as its being tested in a public technical beta first and foremost.