Full list of nominees: https://www.grammy.com/news/2026-grammys-nominations-full-winners-nominees-list

2025-11-04

Another maintenance patch focusing on crashes, some more optimizations, and bug fixes.

Bit very heated after some gametime tonight. hopped on to chill for a bit and shoot some bugs and instead died repeatedly to bullshit mechanics, op bugs, and teamkills. Why the hell is Oshaune so miserable? Why the hell is the dragonroach a mass murdering flying tank? Why the hell does every weapon suck except against your own teammates? Fuck man.

/rant

Big Points:

• PC file size needs to be addressed
• Performance is still being looked at, but the team has had to work hard for even just marginal improvements
• They are considering a closed-beta sort of testing group to enhance their in house testing abilities to have a better chance of catching bugs before patches go live

4 hours left and it's only halfway done. Shame, the constitution is such a fun gun but so ineffective.

Edit: Yeah there's no way half of the kills were from melee with the constitution. Devs just gave us this one lmao

SWEET LIBERTY! Line up to WHACK A TERMINID!

Available TODAY ONLY -- you can show those bugs the meaning of Managed Democracy!, surprise! We made this game from last year's LD schedule a reality!

High command orders you to enjoy freedom corn at your local dissident executions

Ah yes, 30 hive guards is absolutely a fun swarm to fight against.

Edit: Ah yes, a hive lord suplexing your G.A.T.O.R is a feasible and avoidable hazard. (It's actually really funny but losing a whole campaign because of it is rather frustrating)

Full Notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/538868565209514366?l=english

Optimizations for the upcoming release:

• Optimized status effects
• Optimized physics by only enabling powered ragdolls when needed
• Optimized physics body handling for damage calculations
• Optimized Automaton units and NPC eyes, by changing them from particle effects to shaders
• Optimized AI behaviors by analyzing and stripping out redundant code
• Reduced stuttering during drop-in sequence for missions on Hive Worlds
• Improved audio IO performance
• Snow distribution and overall look has been reworked
• Improved performance by tweaking LOD settings for characters
• Optimized asset distribution for several planets types
• Optimized scattered assets such as grass on various planet types
• Optimized asset distribution in Hiveworlds and Terminid caves
• Optimized asset setup and geometry for assets used in Hiveworlds and Terminid caves
• Optimized status effect physics and particle systems while maintaining visual feedback and fidelity
• Optimized various Automaton explosion VFX
• Optimized Acid Rain effects during Acid Storms
• Optimized Dragonroach fire attack VFX
• Made various optimizations to the fire system, including particle and light optimization.
• Improved performance by optimizing the rendering of several shaders

Hopefully the next patch has audio fixes so my team can start diving again.

Yes, he did it on purpose and is is a big fan of HD2

via: https://x.com/Kagan_M_Dunlap/status/1979966271522287944

SEYSHEL BEACH CELEBRATION

The planet Seyshel Beach was liberated earlier this week following a long and concerted campaign by a small but inexplicably dedicated group of Helldivers. To annotate this long-awaited victory over the Illuminate, the citizens of the planet voted to establish the date of the planet's liberation as "Avengement Day."

On this new annual holiday, Beach citizens will pause to remember the planets lost to humanity's foes, and relish the superlative satisfaction of long-awaited retribution.

via: https://x.com/helldivers2/status/1979196299149726007

Performance: Feedback is justified, some future content has been pushed so AH can focus on fixes. They want to address crash rates, frame rates, and general bugs. Details hopefully soon.

What’s Coming: Obviously they can’t share many details, but the team is excited. We don’t know what the enemy is planning, so there will be surprises. There are plans for way into the future.

Design Philosophy: Keep it like a TTRPG, AH has plans but want players to create the story too, moments like Malevelon Creek were created by the PLA and they want to encourage that

Warbond Philosophy: Each bond is trying to sell a fantasy, they aren’t trying to constantly make the new meta weapon, they approach each one as a connected group that creates unique play styles

Message to the Community: thanks for your patience with all of the “we’re so back, it’s so over” moments, AH interacts with the community a lot and look forward to continuing to

Arrowhead's Deputy Technical Director discusses the install size of Helldivers 2

Hey, Helldivers. This is the first of what we intend to become a regular series of posts where the engineering team talks about the technical health of the game and some of the technical challenges we’re working through.

Installation Size

The installation size of HELLDIVERS 2 on PC seems to be a hot topic right now so let’s start with that. The current install size on PCs is around 150 GB. This is roughly three times larger than the same game installed on consoles! Given the amount of content in the game, the size on consoles seems quite reasonable so the obvious question is - why is it so large on PC?

Data Duplication

Much of the data in the PC version of HELLDIVERS 2 is duplicated. The practice of duplicating data to reduce loading times is a game development technique that is primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and optical discs like DVDs.

This practice is largely unnecessary for games deployed on Solid State Drives (SSDs) which is why the console versions of HELLDIVERS 2 do not do this.

The Problem with Mechanical Hard Drives The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time. An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to "seek" or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.

Imagine a large game level with various objects - trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.

The Solution: Duplication

To solve this problem, we deliberately duplicate certain data files (like a common tree texture or a sound effect) and place copies of them in physically close proximity to where they would be needed in the game.

For example, our build system will ensure that a copy of a tree texture is stored on the same part of the disk as the level geometry data. When the game loads the level, the read head can access all the necessary information in a single, continuous sweep, without having to "seek" to a different location. This dramatically speeds up loading times.

The Modern Era: SSDs

The need for this technique has largely disappeared with the widespread adoption of SSDs. An SSD stores data on flash memory chips and has no moving parts. This means that "seek time" is virtually nonexistent. An SSD can access any piece of data on the drive almost instantly, regardless of where it is physically stored.

Increasingly, modern games are optimized for the sequential read speeds of SSDs and do not need to rely on the older method of duplicating assets. This is one of the key reasons why new games often explicitly require an SSD in their minimum system specifications.

Should HELLDIVERS 2 continue to optimize for mechanical HDDs?

This is the six-million-dollar question. On the one hand, they are a part of our minimum spec PC requirements. On the other hand - how many HELLDIVERS 2 players are still using mechanical HDDs? The truth is that we don’t currently know. Even the Steam user surveys are unable to give us data on mechanical HDD use in the overall gamer population. Our best estimates put it at around 12% of all PC gamers but the data is very unreliable and relies on a lot of extrapolations. Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that HELLDIVERS 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication. Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.

Solutions

While we take steps to gain more clarity on the number of impacted players, we are actively exploring several different solutions in parallel and will begin rolling them out in future updates as soon as they are ready. We cannot eliminate all duplication without making loading times for mechanical HDDs 10 times slower and we do not feel that this is acceptable. There are however some compromises that we can make which will improve the installation size without blowing out the loading times too much.

Short term

We’ve made some small gains in the next update by sweeping our systems for unused assets and obvious problems, but you will not likely notice them because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains. It’s not a game-changer but at least the install size will stop growing.

Medium term

Beyond the next update, we’re exploring taking some of the worst offenders in terms of duplication and de-duplicating them by putting them in “very common assets” bundles which will always be loaded under set conditions (eg- specific faction/biome). This does mean that loading times will get a bit worse for players using mechanical HDDs - it is unfortunate but unavoidable. Our early testing shows we should be able to keep this in the range of “less than 30 seconds” rather than “several minutes”. It can also increase the amount of RAM used by the game by loading “common” data that is not always needed. If we don’t make “worst case” RAM usage worse, this should not be noticeable, but it is a risk we are monitoring. By doing some careful measurements and analysis, we should be able to deliver acceptable tradeoffs between RAM usage, loading times and install size.

Long term

Looking further into the future, we plan to make improvements to the engine which will ensure we never waste RAM loading common data that isn’t needed - eliminating one of the drawbacks of the above technique.

Beyond that, the remaining work is a bigger, riskier, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to the game data and potentially replicate some of the de-duplication we do on consoles. We don’t yet know if the impacts to load-times could make these approaches infeasible.

Optional 4k Textures?

Could we create a solution where the highest resolution textures are an optional download? Technically yes - anything is possible. It is not something that is natively supported in our engine though. It would be a substantial project to add this capability. Due to the scope and complexity of the changes we would have to make, this is not our first preference and is honestly something we would only consider if we’re unable to make a big enough impact with our other solutions. Nothing comes for free - time spent making these changes is time not spent optimizing the performance of the game or fixing stability issues.

Summary

So in summary - we’re taking your concerns very seriously but there are no easy solutions. Until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we’re all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time. We’ve clearly reached the limits of how much duplicated data is acceptable so smarter solutions and compromises are now required. We are very carefully weighing up the costs and tradeoffs of the options we have, and we’ll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon.

I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into our tech. If you have any questions about this topic or suggestions for future topics, please reply to this thread.

Thanks for reading, we’re always eager to hear from great engineers and gameplay coders: https://jobs.arrowheadgamestudios.com/

via: https://x.com/helldivers2/status/1973081121291149322

CLASSIFIED: Study closely. Any unauthorized spread of this document or its contents will be investigated and prosecuted as treason.

So I have been giving it a lot of tries. I have to say I just don't like it. I want to like it, but its just so hard to use. Either I shoot too early and don't get the max damage it can do or it blows up. On the blowing up the beeping sound gives to little warning. I keep hearing it and letting go as soon as I can and it will just blow up. I have some better luck in first person view, but still find it unwieldy. Am I really just in the skill issue?

Full message:

Greetings Helldivers,

We know many of you have been experiencing issues including performance drops, stability hiccups, freezes, and the annoying audio bugs.

We’ve seen the feedback across Discord, forums, Reddit and our dashboards. You’ve been loud, clear, and absolutely right to expect better. We also recognise that our recent updates haven’t hit the mark, and our silence hasn’t helped. That’s on us. We read all of it and we are hard at work creating a roadmap to address this.

Starting with the good news: there is an incoming update (mid October-ish) where we’ll start chipping away at:

• Some key crash fixes
• Fixed the Primary weapon/Side-arm audio that stops during a mission
• Minor performance improvements
• Long overdue bug fixes, like Charger footstep sounds (pretty useful) or weapon audio stopping mid mission
• No more landing on caves
• A Balance Pass (we’re unleashing Niklas & Lennart)

For some of the bigger performances pieces unfortunately we can’t wave a ‘short-turnaround-magic-wand’, nor would a 60 day patch fix them fully (rather it would be duct tape where we need to solder); so we’re working on a bigger development plan as to how we can address some of the larger concerns. Short term, we think the above will make a noticeable improvement, and beyond that we’ll keep working on the top issues you keep raising.

In the future, we’re planning more transparency and more talk! We’re looking to share more about the processes, performance and how we got here, plus further improvements and evolution. For starters expect another post next week to kick that off.

Between the Xbox launch, the Halo: ODST Legendary Warbond, the free Into the Unjust update, and other surprises, we’ve welcomed a ton of new players, brought back veterans, and delivered a lot of content. Now, it’s time to double down on fixes, polish, and better communication.

TL;DR We hear you, we want things to be in a better state, we are taking it very seriously, we will continue working and sharing.

Thanks for sticking with us! For Super Earth! The Arrowhead Dev Team