Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have said they will be able to get back to working on future “improvements” for the superb bug-stomping, bot-blasting shooter after finally resolving the weeks-long server struggles caused by the game’s immense popularity.
Helldivers 2 released on February 8th and quickly rocketed to incredible player counts, overtaking the likes of God of War and Spider-Man to become the biggest PlayStation game released on PC to date – and bringing hundreds of thousands of concurrent players crashing into its multiplayer servers.
Said servers were understandably rocked by the enormous influx of heavily-armed managed democracy-spreaders, as Arrowhead’s devs raced to try and increase the maximum server cap to resolve various connection errors, bugs (not like that) and crashes, needing to introduce a queue system and auto-kick AFK players to relieve some of the pressure. (Which then became a sore point for some players in itself.)
Happily, it seems that Arrowhead’s efforts have paid off, as CEO Johan Pilestedt celebrated on X that the game managed to handle its players “without problem” over this weekend just gone. The “amazing achievement” of the team followed the most recent bump of the server cap to handle a whopping 800,000 simultaneous players, giving an idea of just how ridiculously popular Helldivers 2 continues to be.
With the multiplayer problems finally under control, Pilestedt said that the team would have “time to focus on improvements” and “resume our original plan”, teasing that “many exciting things” were planned.
What those things might be remains to be seen, although some eagle-eyed fans have hypothesised the return of the teleporting Illuminate from Helldivers: The First based on in-game hints. What we do know is that there won’t be any PvP – especially when you don’t really need it when you’re probably being blown to bits by a friendly airstrike every couple of minutes anyway. Some extra options for its already deeper-than-you-think stealth mechanics, perhaps? Whatever it is, you can bet there’ll be plenty of people waiting to jump right in. I just hope the Arrowhead folks get some sleep first.
