Over the weekend, Helldivers 2 hit a new all-time-high concurrent player count of 409,367 and was comfortably the second-most-played game on Steam. That number also means that Helldivers 2 has attracted more concurrent players than every other PlayStation release on Steam combined.
Developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, Helldivers 2 launched on PS5 and PC, effectively becoming the first game by a Sony first-party studio to launch on a platform that was not PlayStation. However, it has turned out to be a great decision.
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To put it into perspective, Sony has previously launched some of its first-party titles on PC. However, such launches usually come several years after the initial release. Below are the peak concurrent player counts of all Sony’s first-party titles that have received a PC port.
- God of War (73,529)
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (66,436)
- Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition (56,557)
- The Last of Us Part I (36,496)
- Days Gone (27,450)
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (13,539)
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (10,851)
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (8,757)
- Helldivers (6,744)
Add all their concurrent player count and you will get 300,359. Helldivers exceeded that number on Saturday, February 17, 2024, when its peak player count hit 333,827. By Sunday, the game had added a couple more thousand players pushing the total concurrent player count to over 400,000.
Helldivers 2 has had its fair share of issues
Arguably the biggest challenge of making an online multiplayer game is dealing with server issues. Helldivers 2 is facing a similar challenge with its rising concurrent player number. Over the weekend, deputy game director Sagar Beroshi put out a message on X acknowledging some of the challenges players were facing.
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“We’re aware of a problem that has caused some player rewards to not pay out properly at the end of missions,” Beroshi said. “We are working on a fix for this, but in the meantime, we want to try to alleviate the impact as we head into the weekend.”
“Therefore, from now until the end of this Sunday, February 18th (CET), the game will grant all players XP and Requisition at a 50% multiplier on top of your base mission score. You can tell this additional multiplier is active when you see a Game Master Effect label “Accounting Corrections” while on the Super Destroyer.”
Arrowhead released a patch for Helldivers 2 on Saturday
To help address some of the issues faced by players, Arrowhead released a patch for Helldivers 2 on Saturday that focused on stability and matchmaking. In the patch note, the studio said they were “separately working on the server issues that we’re facing at the moment” and acknowledged that they were aware it was “the highest urgency for most players”. Below are the fixes effected by the new patch.
STABILITY/CRASHES
- Fixed a crash during extraction cutscene relating to text-to-speech
- Fixed a crash happening during extraction in search and destroy missions after consecutive multiplayer missions
- Fixed a crash when getting disconnected during the joining cutscene
- Fixed a crash while shooting from the ‘SMG-37 Defender’ in ADS mode
- Fixed a crash that rarely occurs relating to surface data for footstep effects
- Fixed a rare crash relating to identical particle effects playing
- Fixed a crash that could occur in relation to accepting an invite
MATCHMAKING
- Fixed an issue that caused us to send invalid data to multiplayer services
- Improved lobby sorting to increase the chance of connectivity
BALANCE & OTHER FIXES
- Defend event difficulty has been reduced
- Fix for Suicide, Impossible and Helldive missions being too easy
- Eradicate mission difficulty Increased
- Eradicate mission timer has been increased to 15 minutes
- Updated Mission End screen to display Experience and Requisition multiplier
- Issue where multiple of the same stratagems could be brought to a mission has been resolved
Despite our best efforts to increase server capacity to accommodate all of you who want to dive for Freedom, we are experiencing capacity issues. We are once more working without delay to improve the issue and we hope to have a fix in place as soon as possible. Thank you
— HELLDIVERS™ 2 (@helldivers2) February 17, 2024
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Arrowhead has also identified other issues in Helldivers 2 that need to be fixed. The studio said some of the issues may have been introduced by the current patch or may have persisted from previous patches. Nevertheless, they are working hard to have it all resolved.
Have you played Helldivers 2? What are your initial thoughts on the game? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
