Helldivers 2 makes its “hardest” difficulties harder and its actual hardest mission easier as servers struggle

I’ve been completely hooked on Helldivers 2 since diving into its exceptional Starship Troopers-y bug-blastathon last week, and I’m far from alone – so many people are playing the co-op shooter that developers Arrowhead capped the game’s servers at 450,000 simultaneous players over the weekend to try and alleviate connection and login problems caused by its enormous popularity.

While the studio promise they’re still working on sorting those issues for good without making you wait in a queue, they’ve released a separate patch to make some in-game bug fixes and balance changes – notably twiddling the dials for some of Helldivers 2’s hardest difficulties and an event that wasn’t meant to be its hardest challenge, but has proved almost impossible for many players. (Including me.)

The catchily-named Patch 01.000.009 dropped over the weekend as a continuation of Arrowhead’s work to stamp out more bugs (not those ones) and add some extra stability to its foundations shaken a bit loose by the stampede of players rushing to spread managed democracy.

The patch fixes a number of crashes caused by various situations – including during extraction if you jumped into consecutive multiplayer missions, if you disconnected while shooting down-sights using the Defender, while accepting a party invite and a few others.

Mostly importantly, though, the patch includes a ‘fix’ for several of the game’s hardest difficulty levels, including Suicide, Impossible and Helldive, which were apparently too easy for being difficulties with such intense names. Eradicate missions have also been made tougher, but with more time on the clock – 15 minutes – to complete them.

On the flip side, the much-dreaded Defend community event currently taking place – which requires players to fend off the game’s robot enemies while leading civilians to safety – has been made easier. As someone who has tried and failed to complete even one of the missions, let alone the eight required to complete the time-limited event, I can tell you it was an absolute bastard of a level, as scores of armoured robots appeared, mowing down both fleeing citizens and Helldivers alike with relative ease. Hopefully this latest change means I won’t need to turn in my cape just yet.

The patch makes small improvements to multiplayer matchmaking, fixing an error with invalid data and working to improve lobby sorting when connecting to a match. Even so, Arrowhead are upfront in acknowledging that server issues remain ongoing for now, reassuring players that they are working on sorting the online problems separately to these gameplay-focused patches.

“We know this is the highest urgency for most players and we treat them very seriously,” they wrote in the patch notes, with disconnections, broken mission rewards and other issues still happening. The problems led the team to temporarily boost mission XP and currency rewards over the weekend as a way of making up for missions that don’t pay out – but with the servers still capped, you might find it tricky to even get into the game for the time being.