They admitted to testing nothing, they just [googled it].

To be fair, the massive install size was probably the least of the problems with the game, it's performance has been atrocious, and when they released for xbox, the update that came with it broke the game entirely for me and was unplayable for a few weeks until they released another update.

In their defense, they seem to have been listening to players and have been slowly but steadily improving things.

Playing Helldivers 2 is a social thing for me where I get together online with some close friends and family a few times a month and we play some helldivers and have a chat, aside from that period where I couldn't play because it was broken, it's been a pretty good experience playing it on Linux; even better since I switched from nvidia to AMD just over a week ago.

I'm glad they reduced the install size and saved me ~130GB, and I only had to download about another 20GB to do it.

Performance profiling should be built into the engine and turned on at all times. Then this telemetry could be streamed into a system that tracks it across all builds, down to a specific scene. It should be possible to click a link on the telemetry server and start the game at that exact point.

>These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

>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.

they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, and decided to double it just in case.

It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham.

The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.

"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."

So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.

The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"

The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"

On the flip side I don't remember who did it, but basically extracting textures on disk fixed all the performance issues UE5 has on some benchmarks(sorry for being vague, but I can't find the source material right now). But their assumption is in fact a sound one.

Non-made up numbers from Vermintide 2 (same engine): On PS4 when an optimized build took around 1.5 minutes to boot to main menu, the unoptimized version would take 12-15 minutes [1]. A different benchmark than SSD vs HDD, but shows that the optimization was certainly needed at the time. Though the PS4 was partially to blame as well, with it's meagre 5400 RPM spinny drive.

For their newer instalment, Fatshark went with a large rework of the engine's bundle system, and players on HDDs are complaining about long loading times expectedly. That game is still large at ~80GB, but not from duplication.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/hxkh0x/comment/...

I had assumed the practice started to die off when installing games became dominant over streaming from the disc even on consoles. Seems I was wrong!

The game does ship on disc for console, no?

Maybe it's changed a lot statistically in the last few years but for long time PC gamers used to have the mantra of small SSD for the OS and large HDD for games if they're price conscious so I could see that being assumed to be much more normal during development.

But they did NOT know it would lead to multi-minute load time. They did not measure a baseline.

Instead they did blindly did extra work and 6x’ed the storage requirement.

So they premature optimized for a wrong case.

> multi minute load times

23Gb / 100mb / 60s = 3.92m

So in the worst case when everything is loaded at once (how on a system with < 32Gb RAM?) it takes 4 minutes.

Considering GTA whatever version could sit for 15 minutes at the loading screen because nobody bothered to check why - the industry could really say not to bother.

Some kind of evil, dark counterpart to Moore's law in the making

this is one of the best selling games in history, and is emently popular across the globe.

it had no serious or glaring impact to their bottom line.

thus it was the right call, and if they didn't bother to fix it they'd still be rolling in $$$$

I've worked in games for close to 15 years, and every studio I've worked on we've played the game very regularly. My current team every person plays the game at least once a week, and more often as we get closer to builds.

In my last project, the gameplay team played every single day.

> Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware

How would playing on middle of the road hardware have caught this? The fix to this was to benchmark the load time on the absolute bottom end of hardware, with and without the duplicated logic. Which you'd only do once you have a suspicion that it's going to be faster if you change it...

They could have been lying I guess but I listened to a great podcast about the development of Helldivers 2 (I think it was gamemakers notebook) and one thing that was constantly brought up was as they iterated they forced a huge chunk of the team to sit down and play it. That’s how things like diving from a little bit too high ended up with you faceplanting and rag-dolling, tripping when jet packing over a boulder that you get a little too close to, etc. They found that making it comically realistic in some areas led to more unexpected/emergent gameplay that was way more entertaining. Turrets and such not caring if you’re in the line of fire was brought up I believe.

That’s how we wound up with this game where your friends are as much of a liability as your enemies.

People literally play the games they work on all the time, it's more or less what most do.

Pay 2000$ for indie games so studios could grow up without being beholden to shareholders and we could perhaps get that "perfect" QA,etc.

It's a fucking market economy and people aren't making pong level games that can be simply tuned, you really get what you pay for.