Arrowhead Game Studios has confirmed that it has pressed pause on future content updates for co-op shooter Helldivers 2 in favour of working on improving the title’s overall performance. In a new video, director Mikael Eriksson spoke about this decision, noting that future updates that focus on new features or content will come to the game at a slower pace.
“I would say that there are many things not working right now, performance being one,” said Eriksson when asked about the current state of Helldivers 2. “We can talk about the frames per second on different consoles where you can play Helldivers. But then there’s also crash rates. We have various bugs causing crashes in the game, and then we have the overall bugs.”
“What I can say is that, after the last big update – Into the Unjust – we experienced more issues than what we were comfortable with,” he continued. “The players felt it, we felt it, and I would say that the feedback that we’ve gotten has been very justified. We are taking this very seriously, and we are focusing way more now on addressing these issues to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. And we have made the decision to push some of our content and feature updates a little bit into the future while we’re addressing these things to make sure that we can get to a much more stable state.”
As for what kind of update cadence Arrowhead Game Studios is looking at when it comes to improving the overall stability and performance of Helldivers 2, Eriksson noted that there are some things that can be addressed fairly quickly, especially when it comes to bug fixes. Other things, however, might take longer. This includes more technical issues, like improving frame rates on consoles and overall performance improvements.
“We have our top brains thinking about this,” he said. “And we’ll see, but we’re already making really big improvements. And I’m confident that we’ll get there, and we will be able to talk more in detail about this, hopefully, quite soon.”
Interestingly, studio CEO Shams Jorjani had acknowledged some of the performance issues back in July. On the game’s official Discord channel, he confirmed that the studio would only begin working on bringing in features like AMD’s FSR or Nvidia’s DLSS after it was confident that Helldivers 2’s fundamental performance issues had been fixed.
While there have always been some technical issues with Helldivers 2 throughout its life, the release of Into the Unjust has seemingly pushed the extent of these issues quite far. The update was released last month, and brought with it an entirely new style of missions, which had players diving deep into Terminid Hive Worlds to exterminate the alien bugs. Rather than pitting players against enemies in large, open sandbox-styled levels, the underground setting of the missions in Into the Unjust also revolved quite a bit around environmental destruction.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, with the latter console getting the title relatively recently. For more details, check out our review of the Xbox Series X/S release.
