Helldivers 2 is "starting to break at the seams," game director admits, since Arrowhead kept choosing new content over bug fixes: "Now we're paying the price"

Trust me, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has heard you talking about how bad you want optimization for months now. Its devs understand – they know it's their fault.

"The calls are coming from inside of the house," game director Mikael Eriksson says candidly during a new, official Q&A on YouTube. "Now we're paying the price a little bit for this. So that is why we're so focused right now on addressing this and rethinking a little bit about how we're developing the game."

With its latest patch 4.1.0, Arrowhead is finally making a dedicated effort to correct some of the issues that have plagued the dystopian shooter since its 2024 release, including crashes and unreliable performance.

Eriksson is glad to explain himself. It all comes down to habit: "We keep getting away with things that we really shouldn't be getting away with. And since we do keep getting away with it, we sort of just get used to it, and then we just keep developing the game as we normally do."

But, "eventually," he recognizes, "like where we are where we're at right now – we see that [...] we've been starting to break at the seams, and it's not just in one place, unfortunately. It's in many different places at once."

"This is, you know, in large part on me, that we have focused too much [...] on making new things, and just not enough on fixing the issues that we have," Eriksson says. "That is now something that we're rethinking."

Helldivers 2's 150GB PC install is "unacceptably large," and Arrowhead hopes to work out a solution that could "theoretically slice the size in half."