Arrowhead Game Studios has been very vocal about the fact that Helldivers 2 is built on a technically defunct engine. Helldivers 2 is built on Autodesk Stingray, an evolution of BitSquid that was purchased by Autodesk in 2015 and ended official development in 2018.
Unfortunately, Helldivers 2 was already in development on Autodesk Stingray when the engine was made defunct, and eventually launched in 2024. However, the game has suffered from frequent technical issues including high CPU usage, crashes, and more.
Speaking to fans on the Helldivers 2 Discord server, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani admitted that the studio “underinvested” in its tech. As one of the few studios with a license for Autodesk Stingray still (alongside Warhammer 40,000: Darktide studio Fatshark), Arrowhead is largely alone in its efforts to improve the tech.
When asked if Stingray is “still on life support”, Jorjani told fans that “engines – including Unreal – yield back what you put into them”, adding that “one isn’t ‘better’ than another”, even if they’re technically defunct.
“We’ve underinvested in our tech that we’re now finally doing something about,” Jorjani added, explaining that Arrowhead is continuing to improve the engine internally as it plans for years of additional content for Helldivers 2.
Last year, Helldivers 2’s technical state became a huge issue for the game as the Into the Unjust campaign’s launch brought everything to a boiling point. After delaying content and issuing many months of fixes, the game is now in a much better state. While there are still technical issues, the recent Cyberstan invasion was much smoother than prior events.
“I think we’re better (our stats and sentiment confirm it),” Jorjani told fans, “but we’re still not happy and things can/will be better.”
In the past, HD2 game director Johan Pilestedt explained that working on bringing the game up to its launch level of quality was already a huge challenge. “Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines,” he tweeted. “And yes. The project started before it was discontinued.”
While Helldivers 2 does have its technical issues, it largely doesn’t detract that much from the game’s enjoyment. Yes, it is annoying that the game’s rain does tank the framerate, or that sometimes you’ll be locked into first-person, or that POIs don’t mark as complete. However, Helldivers 2 is a game that is just fun to play, even with its technical issues.
As Arrowhead continues to work on deeper progression systems alongside additional warbonds and new campaigns, the game should hopefully get better from a technical standpoint. However, for a team working on an engine that has been unsupported since before the pandemic, Arrowhead is doing pretty damn well,
