Following its announcement last week, the colossal Into the Unjust update for Helldivers 2 — Arrowhead Game Studios' massively popular and award-winning 2024 co-op shooter — has officially released in-game. It went live on Tuesday morning and tasked players across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PS5 to charge right into the heart of the Terminid bugs' Gloom-infested worlds.
It's truly a huge patch, and the biggest since the Illuminate's invasion of Super Earth. A new "Rupture Strain" of Terminids can now burrow underground in combat, there are underground subterranean missions that largely take place in tunnels and require vastly different tactics due to extremely limited options for air support and resupply, and there are some truly terrifying boss units like Dragonroaches ("flying Bile Titans") and Hive Lords (skyscraper sized worms straight out of Dune), and more.
But while the contents of the update itself are incredibly exciting, its release has also seen a recent major issue with Helldivers 2 exacerbated — one that's ruining the fun for many fans of the game, and making it very difficult to enjoy everything new in the patch.
That issue is performance and poor optimization, which has become an increasingly prevalent concern over the course of the co-op shooter's several recent updates.
Since the new Patch 01.004.000 went live, there have been widespread reports of significant bugs (not the kind we get to shoot), performance problems, crashes, and more.
Several of the top posts on the Helldivers subreddit right now have thousands of upvotes and comments from players on all platforms complaining about everything from extreme framerate drops to frequent crashing when trying to launch a mission, along with glitches causing enemies to become invincible or the complete loss of all in-game audio.
There's also been quite a bit of frustration with Helldivers 2's ever-growing file size on PC, with the game now over 140GB after the latest patch. That's almost double the size of the title's original 70-80GB storage requirement.
"The performance is even worse lol, went from 120 fps to 15 during a bug breach..." wrote one disgruntled Helldiver in regards to how abruptly performance intensive the game becomes when the Terminids call for reinforcements. "You guys getting into missions? My cpu spikes and crashes my pc as soon as I load onto the destroyer… game is literally unplayable," said another.
The original post these comments were in reply to was simply titled, "Arrowhead, this is unnacceptable at this point. Fix your game." Its author went on to assert that "The game is borderline unplayable because of optimization for most people," and that "The lastest patch causes MORE BUGS and fixed barely anything that mattered."
Notably, this fresh wave of performance issues introduced by Into the Unjust come a month after Arrowhead vowed to focus on optimization and bug fixes, with the studio apologizing for the state of the game as of late. "Sorry for the inconvenience," wrote the studio's CEO Shams Jorjani. "We know the game isn't in tip top shape right now."
The good news? The developers have assured fans that they're being heard and that they're hard at work putting together fixes and improvements for everything mentioned above.
"100% get it. Performance is something we’ve talked about a TON today. It’s not good enough," wrote Jorjani in the official Helldivers Discord on Tuesday morning. "A fix for some of the most immediate things is being prepped." They went on to confirm that "The size problem is also being looked at rn," so hopefully Helldivers 2 will get a size reduction in the future as well.
Ultimately, it's reassuring that Arrowhead is looking to seriously address the issues plaguing the experience right now, though in the same vein, it's also frustrating that it took things getting this bad for major refinements to come.
Indeed, it's truly a shame that so many are having such a hard time getting Helldivers 2 to run well, because I'd argue that it's in one of the best states it's ever been in from a gameplay content and balancing standpoint. The Terminids, Automatons, and Illuminate all offer players tons of gameplay variety with their sub-factions and varied mission objectives, and nearly every single weapon and stratagem in the game has a place in its sandbox meta.
For now, all we can do is keep up the fight for our expedition into the Gloom as best we can, supported by all the reinforcements from the recent Xbox release, a slick new arsenal of Helldivers 2 x Halo ODST crossover unlocks, and the Dust Devils Warbond coming out Thursday. Snag that Halo collab Warbond ASAP if you haven't; all of its weapons are fantastic, and its armor's prevention of leg injuries is a huge boon when you're kiting around hordes of bugs, too.
Helldivers 2 is $39.99 on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (Steam), and PS5. Right now, though, you can get it for $35.09 on Loaded (formerly CDKeys), which is a nice little discount on what was undoubtedly one of 2024's best games.
