Over a year ago, Helldivers 2 felt inevitable. The third-person shooter was everywhere, its memes were plentiful, and its player count was almost unheard of.
Flash forward to today and things couldn't be any different. Helldivers 2 seems to be talking less and less, and its player count has gone from a record high of nearly 500,000 on Steam to just 30,636 in the last 24 hours, with Arrowhead Studios' title routinely dropping to the low 10,000s.
Now, in a new Q&A, the Helldivers 2 team acknowledges the mistakes they made and the price they're now paying. It is equally informative and heartbreaking to say the least.
Arrowhead had a really good thing going with Helldivers 2
As first spotted by GamesRadar, in a new Q&A posted on YouTube titled “Democratic Conversation with Mikael Eriksson Part 2,” Eriksson, who is the Game Director of Helldivers 2, flatly admitted that optimization was not something the team prioritized and is now being punished for it.
“The calls are coming from inside the house,” Eriksson said. “Now we're paying a little bit for that. So that's why we're so focused right now on solving this problem and rethinking a little bit how we develop the game.”
The game's latest update, Patch 4.1.0, fixes a number of issues, but as Eriksson noted, the team just ignored things for too long, to their detriment.
“We're still missing things that we really shouldn't,” Eriksson said. “And since we keep getting away with it, we just get used to it and then continue to develop the game as normal.”
The ultimate problem? According to Eriksson, by focusing on “new” things and “not enough to solve the problems we have,” the team finds itself in a rather difficult situation. It's hard to say whether Helldivers 2 would have taken off as well as it did without such support, and it's equally hard to say whether it would have been in a better place with faster optimization. It's a conundrum that probably no game developer would envy, but one that Arrowhead needs to solve quickly.
- Released
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February 8, 2024
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and gore, intense violence, in-game purchases, user interaction
- Developers
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Arrowhead Game Studios, Nixxes
- Publishers
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Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Publishing
