Just over a year ago, Helldivers 2 felt inevitable. Live service third-person shooters were everywhere, memes abounded, and player numbers were almost unprecedented.
Fast forward to today and things could not be any different. Helldivers 2 seems to be getting less and less talked about, with player numbers dropping from an all-time high of nearly 500,000 on Steam to just 30,636 in the last 24 hours, with Arrowhead Studios' title regularly dropping below 10,000.
Now, in a new Q&A, the Helldivers 2 team acknowledges the mistakes they made and the price they are now paying. It's equally informative and also very heartbreaking, to say the least.
Arrowhead had a really good thing going with Helldivers 2.
As first discovered in a new Q&A titled “A Democratic Conversation with Mikael Eriksson Part 2” posted to YouTube by GamesRadar, Helldivers 2's game director Eriksson has emphatically recognized that optimization is not a priority for the team and is now being punished for it.
“I get calls from inside the house,” Erickson said. “Now we’re paying a bit of a price for that, which is why we’re focused on fixing this and rethinking a little bit about how we develop games.”
The game's most recent update, patch 4.1.0, addressed a number of issues, but as Eriksson points out, the team ignored the issues for too long to their own detriment.
“We keep avoiding things we really shouldn’t,” Eriksson said. “And because we keep getting away with it, we get used to it and continue to develop our game as usual.”
What is the ultimate problem? According to Eriksson, focusing on what is “new” and “not enough on solving the problems we have” has left the team in a bit of a difficult predicament. It's hard to say whether Helldivers 2 would have succeeded without this support, and it's also hard to determine whether it would be in a better position with faster optimization. This is a challenge no game developer would envy, but one that Arrowhead must address quickly.
- released
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February 8, 2024
- ESRB
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Adults 17+ / Blood and gore, intense violence, in-game purchases, user interaction
- developer
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Arrowhead Game Studios, Nixxes
- publisher
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Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Publishing
