Helldivers 2 director: ‘fingers crossed’ the game survives this weekend
Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt said he hopes the multiplayer game survives the weekend and the technical stresses its overwhelming success will bring. Pilestedt made the comments on Twitter, where he said he’s dreading the next few days, despite Helldivers 2 being in a much more stable position than it was the previous weekend (thanks, Eurogamer).
“Standing on the threshold of the weekend, with fingers crossed staring intently at the CCU graph and the icons for the various subsystems glowing with a vibrant green ‘OK,’ Pilestedt said in the tweet. “Last weekend, a lot of them were in bright red ‘NOT OK.’”
“While I dread this weekend from a technical perspective, the team has done a fantastic job in ironing out the kinks and I hope you all will be able to have a great time playing the game.”
The sequel proved more popular than the studio expected, and the unexpected strain on the game’s systems means the Helldivers 2 devs have worked late nights, held emergency meetings to fix sudden problems, and had numerous discussions about server capacity and other optimization methods. Pilestedt said that Helldivers 2’s success makes him “very, very pleased,” but that he and the team are “completely exhausted.”
Arrowhead is currently looking to expand the team and lessen the burden while helping ensure future updates go live more quickly.
Helldivers 2 launched on Steam and PS5 on Feb. 8, 2024. After an initial period where server issues meant players couldn’t access the game, its popularity gradually increased. SteamDB’s charts show the co-op shooter reached a new all-time concurrent player count of 255,189 on Feb. 15, 2024, with 161,000 people playing at the time of publication, and that’s not including PS5 users.
While Xbox is looking to expand its user base by porting older games to other platforms, Arrowhead currently has no plans to launch Helldivers 2 on Xbox.
