Helldivers 2 is currently going through a major overhaul with developer Arrowhead Game Studios working on “many more months” of patches to bring the game back to its former glory. 

At the time of writing, there’s a number of major issues with the game, but the team is currently working on fixing bugs, improving performance and also attempting to squash down the game’s massive PC file size.

In an official chat with fans, production director Alex Bolle explained that Arrowhead’s prior release schedule would see major features added to release builds “at the very last minute” which would end up causing unknown issues. 

“For the longest time our features would be considered ready and implemented in the release build at the very last minute,” Bolle said. “We’re working with the teams to stop that.”

The production director said that the team uses “the term ‘functional’ as a minimum standard for when features should be in the game”. Bolle pointed towards the game’s Hive Lords as an example of something that was added to the game in a functional state, but “a very rough version of what players experienced.”

Arrowhead is working to stomp out issues like this for future releases, the production director explained. Instead of adding things “last minute” to release builds – which often results in annoying undocumented changes – Arrowhead is increasing its “hardening” stage of development to increase patch quality. 

“Hardening is our last step in the development process before release,” Bolle said, “and it’s been something that we’ve pledged to take as a main priority moving forward. We are currently addressing the issues and looking for more before we release more goodness for the players.”

With Arrowhead set to resume normal content in the near future, the studio isn’t stopping its plans to continue improving the game’s performance. There’s a lot of work still to be done with the multiplayer co-op game which should make the game not only be more fun to play, but also stop crashing every 40 minutes.