While Helldivers 2 features cross-platform multiplayer across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, developer Arrowhead Game Studios doesn’t currently have plans to also bring in cross-platform progression. Chatting on the official Discord server for Helldivers 2, community manager Katherine Baskin noted that the developer doesn’t have any plans for the feature for the time being.
“We have no plans to add cross progression currently,” said Baskin when asked about whether the feature would come to the co-op shooter.
Studio CEO Shams Jorjani also spoke about the feature. In an attempt to explain why it isn’t on the developers’ to-do list right now, Jorjani said that the studio would love to bring in cross-platform progression to the game. However, there are other things that are more important for the time being, and take priority over the feature.
“For what it’s worth, we’d love to add cross-platform progression, but other things take priority,” said Jorjani.
The CEO likely meant that the studio wants to continue on its current plan of slowing down feature and content development in favour of bringing performance improvements to Helldivers 2. This plan was first announced last month, with director Mikael Eriksson talking about how players have been facing quite a few technical issues since the release of the Into the Unjust update, and how fixing these issues has become the studio’s main priority.
“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.”
Among the things that Arrowhead Game Studios has been looking into is also how the studio can reduce the relatively bloated file size of Helldivers 2 on PC when compared to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions. Eriksson explained that the studio is looking into how it can provide different versions of the game and subsequent updates to players depending on whether they are playing on hard-disk drives or solid-state drives, since the former tends to need more storage taken up by the game owing to asset duplication to reduce load times.
For more details about Helldivers 2, check out our review of its Xbox Series X/S release.
