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Arrowhead

Helldivers 2 devs Arrowhead pull new Rupture Strain bugs offline for five weeks to fix their, er, bugs

by admin September 20, 2025

Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have opted to pull a recently deployed variant of the shooter’s Terminid bugs offline for five weeks, in order to fix issues with them. Yep, for now you can dive onto planets like Oshaune and explore some Into the Unjust update caves without having to worry about burrowing bugs jumping out to mercilessly kick your bottom.

Rupture Warriors have been the main source of Rupture Strain ire since their arrival at the start of this month, as their ability to pop out of the Earth and instantly murder unsuspecting troops has proven tough to counter. At first, those hosting sessions were most at risk of dying like this, but Arrowhead’s attempt to rectify the issue in Tuesday’s patch seemingly put everyone in each party in an equal amount of danger, though some players did dispute this was the case.

Fast forward to now, and the studio have decided the best option is to sub the Rupture Strain out for a little while, until they can return in a more palatable form. “Our patch yesterday combined with other issues regarding the balance of the Rupture Strain have made them function in a way we did not intend,” Arrowhead community manager Katherine ‘Baskinator’ Baskin announced on the game’s Discord server. “We’re going to take the Rupture Strain offline…No other units will be affected. The improved Rupture Strain will be back online in 5 weeks.”

So, there you go, as of 5PM BST on September 17th, the Rupture Strain’s been put back in its box, and will stay there for just over a month while the devs try to persuade those warriors to give folks with machine guns and bombs a fair chance.

A comment an Arrowhead QA lead going by Jojo made in the Discord a couple of days ago sheds a bit more light as to what’s happened since the patch arrived and the Rupture Warriors started mercilessly murdering everyone, rather than just session hosts. Apparently the host focusing quirk was down to a “networking issue” that Arrowhead opted to rectify.

“That is a lot more straightforward to fix then tweaking the attacks and was causing some networking issues,” the developer explained. “So it’s unfortunate that the fix means more people are getting hit by an arguably unfair attack, but it was a needed fix. We are looking into how the rupture enemies have landed but thats a broader issue.”

That look’s clearly convinced the studio that this pulling of the enemies offline is the best course of action, so here’s hoping that when they come back online, the issue of their overtuned attacks making them very unpopular to play against will have been taken care of for the long-term.

Bugged bugs aren’t the only problem Arrowhead have had to grapple with after deploying Into the Unjust, with the days following its arrival plagued by technical gremlins that, to be fair, the studio were quick to say they’d try to sort, even if they weren’t keen on doing a patch that only featured performance tweaks.

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September 20, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

‘PLEASE DON’T NERF COYOTE’: The new Helldivers 2 warbond has a fire-breathing rifle so good that players are begging Arrowhead to leave it alone

by admin September 5, 2025

While the metroidvania inclined celebrate the release of a long-awaited bug game, Helldivers 2’s stalwart protectors of freedom are hard at work ensuring no bugs will know another day of peace. This week, the Into the Unjust update kicked off a new offensive into Terminid strongholds, a directive that’s proving tougher than expected.

A new “Rupture” class of Terminid, recognizable by its red armor plating and burrowing technique, is wreaking havoc on reinforcements. While players have identified effective weapons to counter the novel threat, it’s no coincidence that the latest premium warbond, Dust Devils, is packing what might be the ultimate anti-Terminid primary: the AR-2 Coyote.

The most active corner of the Helldivers 2 community has already anointed the Coyote to gun royalty, singing its praises against bugs and preemptively begging Arrowhead not to nerf it.

It’s really a thing of beauty: With a rounded profile, long barrel, and curved magazine, the Coyote is undoubtedly meant to evoke an AK-47. Its baseline stats aren’t extraordinary for its weapon class, but its numbers don’t really communicate why it kicks carapace.

The Coyote’s main draw is its incendiary ammunition, a first for non-laser assault rifles. As fire is comfortably the best status effect in terms of raw damage (and especially good for bugs), the Coyote flashes its teeth by unleashing a 45-round magazine into a wave of advancing bugs, killing most on contact and setting the rest on fire to die seconds later. I didn’t even mention that it has medium penetration, making it one of just four assault rifles that can punch through the Rupture strain’s armor.

I don’t wish to be dramatic. from r/Helldivers

When you look at the AR-2 Coyote in detail, it’s as if Arrowhead was trying to design the last Terminid gun you’ll ever need:

High damage: Base damage is weaker than other medium-pen ARs, but the fire damage adds big
Medium penetration: so it rips through anything smaller than a Charger
Fire ammo: You can literally fire one bullet at a bug, then watch it die from fire in seconds
Large magazine: A 45-round magazine (without any upgrades) means you can shoot everything chasing you before a reload is necessary
Easy recoil control: The Coyote kicks harder than a Liberator, mind you, but its recoil pattern is a steady vertical climb that’s easy to compensate for. Also, it has unlockable grips.

It’s the sort of gun that just feels comfortable and fun as soon as you use it, which is what you want when spending $10 on a warbond. Nerfs wouldn’t surprise me, but a post from redditor RandomGreenArcherMan offers sharp points that toss cold water on the Coyote’s dominance: its lower base damage means it kills some enemies slower than a Liberator, burning doesn’t tend to matter against smaller enemies that die in one bullet anyway, and it doesn’t have access to 60 or 80-round magazine upgrades.

Plus, ArcherMan reckons it’s not great against Automatons, who aren’t as easy to burn and reward precision headshots. That’s not to suggest the Coyote isn’t a sterling product of Super Earth engineering, just that it’s currently being deployed in its ideal warzone: bugs with medium armor.

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September 5, 2025 0 comments

A large Dragon Roach in Helldivers 2 looms in front of a soldier trying to shoot it down.

Product Reviews

As bugs and bad performance spoil an otherwise excellent Helldivers 2 update, Arrowhead CEO says its ‘technical debt is crippling’

by admin September 3, 2025

A major Helldivers 2 update is here, but somebody invited the wrong kind of bugs to the party. The Into the Unjust update takes the fight to Terminid strongholds, plunging Super Earth’s finest into cave systems guarded by acid-spitting bug dragons.

That’s all well and good, but a new wave of bugs (the software kind) is threatening to ruin the good times. Folks are reporting huge, inexplicable framerate drops before and during missions, others are crashing all over the place, and those new cave expeditions have introduced some annoying quirks, like a tendency to respawn on top of the level, where the only option is to fall to your death.

Helldivers 2’s technical state is bad enough that Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani spent hours yesterday responding to complaints in the Helldivers Discord, taking responsibility for the instability and explaining how Helldivers 2 has built up “technical debt” over time.

“Performance is something we’ve talked about a TON today. It’s not good enough. A fix for some of the most immediate things is being prepped,” Jorjani responded to one fan.

“The technical debt is crippling,” he responded to another. “With the Xbox release behind us, we’ll be able to take a much better stab at it. Like a double stab. With a bigger knife.”

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(Image credit: Discord)(Image credit: Discord)(Image credit: Discord)

In games, tech debt is typically associated with technical problems increasing as a game grows more complex. That’s what Helldivers 2 is going through in a big way, according to Jorjani.

Compared to other games with regular update schedules, Helldivers 2 changes a lot: An average Apex Legends update may add a new character and map element, but Helldivers 2 receives new enemy types, weapons, maps, and missions every few months. It’s enough that a studio of any size would struggle to keep it squeaky clean, and Arrowhead isn’t particularly big.

That said, Arrowhead isn’t making excuses. In a handful of responses, Jorjani reinforced that he considers the current state of the game unacceptable:

“We’ve been lax in setting standards for what’s fine.”

“This is us trying to get our shit in order: make fun content and keep tech afloat. [We’re] not quite there.”

When asked if Helldivers 2 is due for an “Operation Health” update that focuses solely on performance over content, Jorjani said he’d like to avoid that if possible.

“The way we want to operate is that every update is also a health update. But we didn’t hit the mark with this one.”

“We’d prefer not to have to do a performance-only update, but if that’s something that is needed, we’ll do it. But no one update will tackle all tech debt.”

For what it’s worth, I ran a few missions last night with minimal issues (no crashes or major framerate drops), so it’s not exactly unplayable at the moment, but other bugs that predate yesterday’s update have been grinding our gears, like one that causes audio to get horribly staticky and loud until the mission’s over.

Fingers crossed that the planned hotfix will squash the most pressing problems. Jorjani didn’t give a timeframe for such an update, but given the speed of past hotfixes, I’d be surprised if it didn’t arrive by the end of the week.

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September 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Arrowhead will target Helldivers 2’s “crippling” tech issues now Xbox release is sorted, but would rather not do a “performance-only update”

by admin September 3, 2025

Shams Jorjani, boss of Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead, has taken to Discord to address the rise in reports of performance issues following the arrival of the shooter’s Into the Unjust update. In addition to admitting that the new addition has missed the mark from a stability pespective, the exec added that the game’s Xbox release now being in the rear view mirror should free up more resources to tackle performance problems.

Since the Terminid spelunking expedition-themed update arrived yesterday, players have cited an uptick in crashes that Arrowhead are already looking into, with the installation size the game’s ballooned to on PC and your usual sorts of pesky bugs also being sources of ire, at least among vocal online Helldivers.

In light of that, Arrowhead CEO Jorjani made one of his fairly regular trips to Helldivers 2’s Discord server last night, to address some of the concerns folks there were raising. “Performance is something we’ve talked about a TON today. It’s not good enough,” he admitted fairly early on. “A fix for some of the most immediate things is being prepped.”

“Nobody is saying ‘this is fine’ at Arrowhead or PlayStation,” he added an a separate post. “We are talking about what to do differently – cus we really want to release content AND keep performance in line. With [the] Xbox release behind us more resources will be available.” Jorjani made the last point a number of times, when discussing fixes for performance issues that’ve drawn ire from players on and off for a while, but have come to a head with this update.

The update isn’t the root cause of the issues. Instead, the CEO links them to a build-up of engine-related limitations he calls “technical debt”. “The technical debt is crippling,” he wrote in another of these many posts. “With the Xbox release behind us we’ll be able to take a much better stab at it. Like a double stab with a bigger knife.”

Jorjani reckons a single massive performance-focused update – something he said Arrowhead would “prefer not to have to do”, but will if it’s “needed” – wouldn’t be enough to tackle all of this tech debt. He also suggested that pulling all the game’s developers off of creating new additions, like warbonds, and putting them onto fixes isn’t the simple solution it might seem, writing: “if we could put every single soul on just performance/stability and significantly improve those we would – but not everyone can make an impact on performance and the issues that need to be fixed are complex and take time to work at.”

I didn’t run into any major issues while dipping my toe into the update last night, but here’s hoping Arrowhead can offer some performance relief soon. For now, their CEO doesn’t reckon this uptick in player dissatisfaction has put the shooter back in as dire straits as it found itself following the Escalation of Freedom update last year. The studio ended up unveiling a 60-day plan of tweaks, in an effort to turn around player sentiment back then.

While acknowledging there are “definitely some similarities” between the two situations, Jorjani argued that this time it at least isn’t a double whammy of player frustrations about how the game plays mechanic-wise and how it runs. “Since then, I think it’s safe to say we’ve fixed one thing and kept wobbling on the other,” he wrote. “I hope we proved back then that we won’t give up till we get it right.”

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September 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Helldivers 2’s Into the Unjust update has caused an uptick in crashes, and Arrowhead are “working to isolate fixes”

by admin September 3, 2025

Helldivers 2’s Terminid spelunking update, dubbed Into the Unjust, has dropped from orbit today, September 2nd. Sadly, that hellpod’s impact with the game’s surface looks to have triggered an uptick in crash reports, and Arrowhead are now busy “working to isolate fixes”.

If you missed the update’s announcement the other day, Edwin was strapped into the news driver’s seat at the time, and has a nice rundown of what’s in it here. He even consulted some very real geographers, the absolute pro. The short version? Terminid cave missions on Hive Worlds to aid Super Earth’s efforts to fight an evil cloud, and some new enemies flying around.

Sadly, as Arrowhead have been admirably transparent about in the past, new additions to Helldivers 2 tend to bring with them a helping of new issues that need shooting into submission. Into the Unjust’s been no different, with a wave of fresh crash reports leading community manager Katherine Baskin to let players know via Discord that the devs are on the case.

“We are aware of the issues with crashing, which are NOT in accordance with Super Earth Standards and we are working to isolate fixes now. We apologize for this delay and will report back with updates soon,” she wrote. Phew, now the many folks writing their own individual Reddit posts about encountering crashes can chill out a bit.

Speaking of the Helldivers 2 subreddit, in my trip there to check just how widespread the crash chatter was, I ran into a number of folks also registering their unhappiness at quite how beefy the game’s file size is getting on PC. As someone who’s had the update installing onto my games box since late this morning, and as of yet hasn’t had it finish patching all of its files, that really hit me where I live.

It’d be unwise to assume that the file size is the only factor contributing to Helldivers 2 taking a while to update – I’m usually the first to go the other way and assume the problem must be on my end – but given a thread on the subject’s amassed 9.1k upvotes and just under 800 comments in about six hours, landing near the top of the subreddit, it’s maybe worth Arrowhead looking into. That said, in my case there’s also the fact I’ve been using my PC to do my job while Into the Unjust’s been downloading, and that may well have had an impact.

Regardless, I’ve got some bug spelunking planned for tonight, so you may well hear about my travails if anything noteworthy or wacky happens.

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September 3, 2025 0 comments