Helldivers 2 devs are working on bug fixes, but 'Arrowhead still has a very small team' after its surprise success, and 'there's just only so much time in a work week'

Helldivers 2 is one of the most impressive multiplayer games in recent memory—enjoying such a runaway success that you could barely play it for the first handful of weeks, due to chronically overloaded servers. It's also, unfortunately, a little buggy right now—and I'm not talkin' Terminids.

As highlighted by recent patch notes, damage-over-time effects aren't applied under certain conditions—and certain scopes, like that of the Anti-Materiel Rifle, have been busted for even longer. Sickles can't shoot through foliage, the Spear misses more than I whiff headshots on Automaton hulks. It's a little rough out there. Even before some of these bugs, crashes were about as common as Super Earth flags on any appropriately patriotic suburb.

Arrowhead Games has been trying to keep pace, but one gets the feeling they're losing in a war of whack-a-mole right now. In a message to the game's Discord server, community manager Spitz painted a picture of the studio's current problems:

«Most of the bugs in the known issues list in ⁠⁠[the patch notes] are actively being worked on, but they're either large fixes that require a bit of time or low-priority issues behind other things, and most should be patched in the next major build. It's difficult to maintain our cadence of one Warbond per month while also fixing major technical glitches in time for the next patch.»

This goes against conventional gamer, not-a-developer wisdom. One that argues development teams are made out of highly specialised devs working in silos—or, in other words, that Helldivers 2's blistering patch cadence isn't taking away time from troubleshooting. While there are a few grains of truth to this (especially for larger teams) it's not at all uncommon for devs to wear multiple hats. As Spitz later explains in a response to a thread on the game's subreddit:

«This is patently untrue,» Spitz replies to a comment arguing that bug fixes should take priority over everything else. «Arrowhead still has a very small team