Since its 2024 release, Helldivers 2 has seen quite a few performance and technical issues. Taking to the official Discord server (as caught by FRVR), Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Shams Jorjani wrote about these technical issues, which largely come down to the fact that Helldivers 2 is built on Autodesk Stingray—a game engine that is largely considered defunct since 2018.
Despite the fact that Autodesk no longer supported Stingray as far back as 2018, however, the studio had decided to stick with the engine largely due to Helldivers 2 already having been well into development. Now, however, Jorjani has acknowledged that Arrowhead “underinvested” in the technology powering the co-op shooter. Matters aren’t really helped by the fact that, since Autodesk doesn’t offer any support, Arrowhead Game Studios is largely on its own whenever new issues pop up.
“We’ve underinvested in our tech that we’re now finally doing something about,” said Jorjani when asked by a Discord user whether Stingray is “still on life support”. He noted that, when it comes to game engines, “one isn’t ‘better’ than another,” and that “engines – including Unreal – yield back what you put into them.”
While Helldivers 2 has continued to see quite a few technical issues, especially when major updates like last year’s Into the Unjust roll around, Jorjani has noted that the studio continues to make improvements to the game engine to make sure future releases are smooth. “I think we’re better (our stats and sentiment confirm it),” Jorjani said, “but we’re still not happy and things can/will be better.”
However, considering Jorjani’s desire for Helldivers 2 to be a “forever game”, Arrowhead Game Studios will have to continue to make improvements to the Stingray engine by itself. Jorjani had spoken about this desire back in September, noting that there are “no plans for [Helldivers 3] – just [Helldivers 2] for as long as it can go”. He brought up classic MMORPG RuneScape for the sake of comparison when it comes to the longevity of a game.
“Myself and the directors agree we would love this to be a forever game,” Jorjani wrote. “Assuming we get a grip on the performance and dev practices we can keep expanding it for a long time. PlayStation is super supportive.”
Among the technical issues plaguing the co-op shooter were game crashes that were seemingly caused from too many particle effects being created in the course of regular gameplay. Thankfully, however, the studio quickly released an update to fix this issue, along with fixing another one where the game could crash while Helldivers were in Hellpods after being reinforced.
Despite these technical issues, however, Helldivers 2 has continued to see quite a bit of success. A report from January indicated that more than 20 million copies of the co-op shooter had been sold so far. Taking the report at face value and not factoring in any of the microtransactions or premium Warbonds, this means that Arrowhead Game Studios has made gross revenue of more than $700 million.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
