It appears the universe is filled to the brim with patriots looking to liberate the universe from Terminids and Automatons with equal unbridled prejudice.
After launching on February 8, the headlines surrounding Helldivers 2 have been about how awesome it is to play and how hard it is to get inside the game. The latter is the result of the former. The third-person shooter has become so popular that the game’s servers can no longer keep up.
Heading into Helldivers 2‘s second weekend, Arrowhead Game Studios’ CEO Johan Pilestedt expressed his confidence in the team’s preparations for the incoming influx of players but that wasn’t the case.
Midway through the weekend, Helldivers 2 players started reporting that they’d encountered the same round of issues: difficulty logging in, unsaved progressions, server issues, and problems with receiving their hard-earned rewards.
Once again, the game’s popularity had forced the studio to push out multiple fixes in quick succession but to no avail. The official Helldivers 2 account eventually took to Twitter to post an update, saying:
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.
So if you’re still seeing failed to connect to server” error messages, know you’re not alone.
In an earlier post on Helldivers 2‘s discord channel, the developers explained they’ve tried a bunch of different workarounds to stabilize the servers, even limiting the number of players that can log onto the game purposely just so those who had already logged in had a better gameplay experience.
To be fair, Helldivers 2‘s problems aren’t solvable by simply throwing money at it, as Palworld‘s developers, Pocketpair, recently found out.
The good news is that Helldivers 2 works once you’re already inside and it’s a ton of fun even for free players. The only issue is your patience or possible lack thereof.
Helldivers 2 is the first game in Sony’s upcoming lineup of live-service titles. Its success on Steam is a good sign for Sony’s current plans to aggressively pursue multiplatform releases. Unfortunately, earlier precedent suggests that it’s never coming to Xbox but if it does, it’ll likely be on PC Game Pass first.
