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.”