Helldivers 2 is in its self-care era. At least, that was the major takeaway from a frank Q&A with the game’s director Mikael Eriksson, where he discusses, among other things, a new schedule for patches that the team hopes will lighten Helldivers 2’s technical debt.
The critically acclaimed live-service shooter, which tasks players with grouping up and tackling hordes of alien foes in overwhelmingly hostile environments, has fallen on especially hard times lately. Frequent updates to the game since its launch in February of 2024–including fixes, balancing patches, and content drops–has caused Helldivers 2 to suffer from balance and performance issues and settle into an unsteady ebb and flow.
This instability has only hurt the game’s diehard playerbase, who have spent months now fighting against crashes, increasingly untenable performance issues, growing file sizes (at least, on PC) and more wonkiness than is generally acceptable of Helldivers 2’s sometimes slapstick action.
As a result, Arrowhead Studios, the developer working on Helldivers 2, recently announced that it would be pumping the brakes on content updates and the game’s planned roadmap for a while. The goal of the temporary hiatus is to give the team the ability to diagnose and work on Helldivers 2’s multiple issues, which stem from the game’s hazardous live environment, its developers nonstop cadence of content drops, and years of technical debt adding up.
To that end, Eriksson revealed that Arrowhead’s plan moving forward is to deploy patches every two weeks for the next few months in order to reduce the number of critical bugs impeding players’ ability to enjoy Helldivers 2. In the latest Q&A, Eriksson cited the game’s most recent patch as an example of what it intends, claiming that it fixed about 200 of Helldivers 2’s bugs. Arrowhead hopes to keep hitting these patches before resuming with Helldivers 2’s content roadmap around December.
Elsewhere, Eriksson was also probed about the game’s tremendous file size on PC, where it sits above 140 GB. He claims that the team is aware of how “unacceptably large” this is and that the issue stems from the team optimizing for hardware that uses mechanical HDDs, mentioning that they introduce hurdles that the team overcomes by duplicating files.
Per Eriksson’s comments, Arrowhead is working on ways to cut down the file size, including potentially finding ways to push updates to PCs that use one of these drives over the other, but it is currently still looking for the best possible answer to this problem.
The rest of the interview dives into more of Helldivers 2’s issues including the potential causes of crashes, whether the game’s anit-cheat could be responsible for bricking PCs, and justification for the studio’s usage of the Stingray engine. It’s a meaty and honest interview, even if Eriksson does sidestep some of the game’s more pressing problems, like weapon balance.
