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Arrowhead Game Studios may have captured lightning in a bottle, but it seems that it’s been nearly impossible to keep the lid on during the process. Helldivers 2 has been lauded by players and critics, including our team, since its launch on February 8, 2024, but the hype came at a cost. We may be witnessing one of the worst launches ever for one of the best games in recent memory with Helldivers 2.
What’s Wrong With the Helldivers 2 Launch?
I remember not immediately boarding the hype train, entirely due to budget constraints, when Helldivers 2 launched for PlayStation 5 and PC. I knew all along it would be an excellent title, especially with the clear influence from Starship Troopers and Halo to even hints of Warhammer 40,000’s Imperial Guard.
It’s a pastiche of satirical jabs at the military-industrial complex and hero mythology mixed into an irresistible live-service shooter cocktail. What’s wrong with that?
Please try again later. This grating phrase triggers Helldivers 2 players much like it does for Tim Horton’s drinkers come ‘Roll Up the Rim’ season. The gameplay is satisfying, save for the occasional bugs (hold for applause at the Terminid pun), with an enticing, current-era Halo Infinite-like gear customization system. It feels good to play, and it frankly looks far superior as an AA game to Ubisoft’s egregious ‘AAAA’ abomination Skull and Bones. But it collapses the moment it performs above its expectations.
It feels like a labor of love touted by an amiable Johan Pilestedt, Arrowhead’s current CEO, but it’s clear that budgets weren’t allocated to server capacity. The game runs great and is worth the price of admission, but it’s so popular that people have a hard time getting to play. It turns out that despite such a winning combination, such a fundamental flaw can collapse public opinion for Helldivers 2 like a house of cards.
But the Memes Are Funny, Right?
Look, as much as I’d love to photoshop a cape and infantry armor onto Eric Andre as he screams at Error Code 10002038 to let him in, it overstayed its welcome. It’d be different if this was your typical live service debacle, of which there are far too many. But instead, there’s a recent reemerging and unsettling trend: unstable connections for fairly high-priced games.
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10 Best Helldivers 2 MemesMoreover, the other types of memes lampooning the game’s themes of a brutal yet upbeat military imposing order over the galaxy can backfire. It’s amusing to talk about the game, but it’s also far more frustrating to experience a game to which you have no access yet paid full price.
We did our part, right? We get to be citizens of Super Earth for contributing, right? Wrong. Our punishment? Three hours of waiting to join a lobby as punishment, and ten lashes for good measure, for the Starship Troopers fans still reading.
Capping the Servers is a Sensible Yet Unpopular Decision
I want to stress that while the Helldivers 2 situation brings out our worst instincts, underneath the protracted, disastrous launch is a good game. Keeping a lid on things preserves server stability, but it inevitably turns booting up the game into a feeding frenzy.
I remember finishing sessions in HD2 and having to get back to writing articles but would leave my session open with a tinge of shame, knowing I could be responsible for holding someone else out of the game.
This isn’t Arrowhead’s fault. As players have already pointed out, the game’s incredible trajectory, reaching 457,659 concurrent players on SteamDB on February 21, 2024, is impossible to ignore. It’s PlayStation’s biggest success story in terms of concurrents since they started releasing their console exclusives to PC. It’s a big deal, and it’s immensely popular.
For scale, the predecessor, Helldivers, peaked at 6,744 players 9 years ago. There was no way this level of success could be predicted, so it’s clear budgets were not set up for servers to handle hype of this magnitude.
The Best Kind of Bad Situation
As aggravating as it is to have such a wonderfully crafted, cheeky new shooter as the shiny new toy everybody (including Phil Spencer) wants to play on their home system, it could be worse. Thinking back to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 (as one does when recalling legendarily bad launches) at least Helldivers 2 was released in a reasonable state. There’s no need to talk about comebacks like No Man’s Sky because, as long as the server issue is handled, players can still recognize that this game was released in a far better state.
Aside from goofy glitches like Terminid character models stretching into the skies, at least your avatar is never suddenly t-posing nude on their drop pod. The dichotomy here is that Helldivers 2 is a brilliant game forcibly holding off more people from playing to remain stable, while Cyberpunk 2077 was rushed to the impatient masses in an unfinished, embarrassing, nigh-unplayable state, especially for previous-gen console owners.
For Arrowhead Game Studios, while Helldivers 2 may have had one of the worst launches ever, the nature of the problem is the best kind of bad situation. Everybody everywhere wants to play it, and it’ll inevitably inspire a trend of imitations. No matter how begrudgingly we may do it, the Sunken Cost Fallacy isn’t our sole reason for waiting. Even the CEO’s urging isn’t why we wait to play. We are willing to wait to play it because it’s just that fun.
