Helldivers has a progress-wiping bug if your controller dies

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If you're like me, you've spent the last few days gleefully dropping onto alien worlds to exterminate the local population and, occasionally, your fellow soldiers. Helldivers is a wonderful thing to play online, but it's still suffering from a few post-launch jitters, the worst of which is a progress-wiping bug that will likely strike if your controller runs out of juice.

Arrowhead Game Studios is warning players of a specific (but disturbingly common) chain of events that could boot you back to Private, wiping away all your unlocked weapons, stratagems, perks, and research. If your PS3 or PS4 controller's battery runs low while you're playing, don't switch to a new one! Just plug the old one in until you're done.

Otherwise, reconnecting with a different controller may cause the game to spawn in a fresh character, and if you happen to hit a save point with that new character, all of your old progress will be lost. If you find your seasoned Helldiver suddenly replaced with a fresh recruit in the middle of a game, you may be able to preserve the old one by restarting before any saves can complete.

If your Vita battery runs out in the middle of a mission, well... problem solved.

Arrowhead says it's isolated the bug causing this specific issue and it will be removed in patch 1.03 (along with a bunch of other fixes and tweaks), though it didn't provide an ETA for the update. Players are also reporting some other issues leading to lost progression, so hopefully they'll all get stamped out soon.

The only bugs I want to see in Helldivers are the direct Starship Troopers reference kind.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.