Helldivers 2 slims down for the holidays.
(media.scored.co)
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They can't even guarantee it had any real positive effect. It's not like Helldivers is telling the HDD precisely where to write things. These files-in-triplicate could all be right next to each other, while big individual files are fragmented and scattered all over the disk.
100% this. Data duplication made perfect sense when you're reading off optical media where you control where the tracks are. You don't want the read head having to index back and forth constantly. You want similarly accessed data in nearby rings.
On a PC, the dev doesn't really have control over where the files are written in the first place. Now, what I could believe is that every subsequent expansion duplicated assets from the previous releases, because they knew that updating the originals would invite fragmentation.
My money is on them not being confident that they weren't breaking old content so they just made the new content effectively standalone. Probably punted on regression testing too.
It could just be sheer lazyness. Just duplicating assets because it's easier to copy-past entire structures than it is to properly link them one at a time.
^ This guy has defragged a hard drive before.