Arrowhead Studios released their newest game, Helldivers 2, to a level of success they weren’t prepared to handle.
The game, a third-person cooperative shooter, requires a constant online connection to play, and Arrowhead designed their servers to comfortably host 250,000 players. On the day of the sequel’s premier, Helldivers 2 struggled to host nearly a half-million players logging in at once and ultimately failed to do so. People purchased the game, priced at $40, only to be kept from playing by an error screen reading, “Servers at capacity. Please try again later.”
The server issues were so prevalent that, despite critical acclaim, the game was advertised on PC as having “mixed” reviews. Players were giving the game a “Not Recommended” vote on Steam (the leading market for PC games) when faced with being unable to login.
Many of these negative votes claimed that the gameplay was fantastic when they could play but that queue times were beyond unacceptable; some players had to wait up to six hours to play. Many resorted to leaving the game running while they were at work, school, or even overnight to play later.
Players lucky enough to get in left the game running after playing so they wouldn’t have to wait in line again next time. However, the developers hadn’t implemented any systems to disconnect absent players, which only compounded their server capacity issues.
Arrowhead Studios’ CEO, Johan Pilestedt, tried to apologize to the community with a weekend where all in-game rewards are doubled. This “Double XP” weekend only encouraged already frustrated players to redouble their efforts at logging in to take advantage of the limited-time event. The community began mocking the poor decision, venting their dissatisfaction to Pilestedt’s official X account.
Pilestedt responded to these tweets with, “Yeah, in retrospect maybe this was not the best idea.” As of February 23, Arrowhead announced via X that the Helldivers 2 servers had been upgraded to hold 700,000 players.
Even then, the developers said, “Unfortunately, we expect the [concurrent players] to reach that level.”
Arrowhead Studios admitted that they were woefully unprepared for the popularity of their game. The developers believe the surprise success came from the game’s marketing campaign. The advertisements relied on heavy-handed satire of American ideologies while also bringing attention to their non-traditional technique for keeping the game fresh.
The cooperative aspect of the game has players fighting to liberate planets around the galaxy from various foes, such as the “Socialist Automatons” and “Undemocratic Termanids.” Controlling these factions is a single employee only ever referred to as “Joel.” His job? To observe ongoing missions and directly change the game’s world.
Joel injects a deeper sense of realism into the enemies by controlling them directly rather than leaving it up to a program.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Pilestedt said that Joel “had to get up in the middle of the night to give the Automatons a bit of reinforcements.” Joel believed the liberation of a planet the Automatons attacked wasn’t challenging the players enough to provide a satisfying balance between danger and accomplishment.
While the game was plagued with connectivity issues, Pilestedt believes the worst of it is in the past. While he hasn’t claimed to completely fix the connectivity issues, the game’s ratings have been on the rise since the latest patch.
Most consumer reviews on Steam claim that the worst of the problems have passed. Of the 182,000 customer ratings, Helldivers 2 now rests at a rating of “Mostly Positive.”
Helldivers 2 is available now on PlayStation 5 and PC.
