Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have once again addressed the range of performance issues that’ve come to afflict the shooter, teasing a mid-October update that they reckon should deliver a “noticeable improvement” and outlining that wider plans are in the works in terms of dealing with some larger problems.
Problems with Helldivers 2’s stability and general bugginess of the bad kind rose to prominence again following last month’s Into the Unjust update. Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani was quick to admit that the game’s performance was “not good enough”, citing “crippling” technical debt as being st the root of some of the more deep-seated issues. At the time, he said the studio would likely prefer not to put out an update focused only on performance fixes unless it was totally necessary, but it appears that might have been deemed to be the case.
We know many of you have been experiencing issues including performance drops, stability hiccups, freezes, and the annoying audio bugs…We also recognise that our recent updates haven’t hit the mark, and our silence hasn’t helped. That’s on us,” reads a tweet attributed to the entire Arrowhead team.
They go on to tease an update they’re aiming to release “mid October-ish”, which they reckon “will make a noticeable improvement” in the short-term. As to which problems it’ll target/fixes it’ll include, the studio listed the following:
- Some key crash fixes
- Fixed the Primary weapon/Side-arm audio that stops during a mission
- Minor performance improvements
- Long overdue bug fixes, like Charger footstep sounds (pretty useful) or weapon audio stopping mid mission
- No more landing on caves
- A Balance Pass
Beyond that, Arrowhead wrote: “For some of the bigger performances pieces unfortunately we can’t wave a ‘short-turnaround-magic-wand’, nor would a 60 day patch fix them fully (rather it would be duct tape where we need to solder); so we’re working on a bigger development plan as to how we can address some of the larger concerns.”
They closed out by promising more communication and transparency with players going forwards, something that’s long been a bit of an achilles heel in the otherwise admirable job the studio have done in terms of working to sustain their live-service about super service. We’ll see if they’re finally able to get on top of it this time, possibly by bringing in more folks to help out a community team that from what I’ve seen already do an awful lot in terms of answering questions and addressing concerns on the game’s very active Discord. The issue’s generally been the comms which goes beyond that sector of the playerbase, with responses on Discord regularly having to be reposted elsewhere to get word out.
Arrowhead have their hands full from the perspective of new additions to the game too at the moment. They recently had to commit to turning off a new strain of Terminids for just over a month in an effort to fix issues with the burrowing bugs.
