Arc weapons shouldn't crash your game anymore in Helldivers 2, so you can zap to your heart's content

Helldivers 2
(Image credit: Arrowhead)

The latest Warbond for Helldivers 2 includes a lot of ways to dispense electric justice—and ways to survive those zaps when they inevitably blow back in your face. Unfortunately, an entirely different problem's been slaying Helldivers lately: A frozen game client.

For almost an entire week, weapons like the Arc Thrower, the Arc Shotgun and the Tesla Tower stratagem have been crashing games at random, even if you're not the unlucky sod firing the things. It's one thing for a weapon to boot you if you're using it, it's another entirely to hope your three other random teammates got the memo and don't deploy with a game-killing gun.

Fortunately, that should all be fixed now. Arc weapons and stratagems should no longer crash your game. Community Manager Baskinator also shared a list of known issues the team at Arrowhead's still working on, as per the game's official Discord:

  • Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play:
    Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab.
    Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
    Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand.
    Players cannot befriend players with Steam names shorter than 3 characters.
  • Hellpod steering close to large or important objects is currently not functioning as intended, resulting in steering being disabled in a large area around the object.
  • Online features are not functioning when console language is set to Ukrainian.
  • Players may be unable to select loadout when joining a multiplayer via an activity card.
  • Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
  • Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state.
  • Exosuits will sometimes be delivered in a damaged or broken state.
  • Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
  • Pink artifacts may appear in the sky when setting off large explosions.
  • Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.
  • Sometimes the player’s loadout customizations will reset after restarting the game.

Honestly, this is good news. I've been taking a bit of a break from Helldivers 2 to plant bombs on cyclops heads in Dragon's Dogma 2—but I won't lie, the potential of getting punted out of a game I'm in (and losing all of my hard-earned XP, requisitions, and samples as a result) hasn't had me thrilled to jump back in my hellpod.

As for what we have to look forward to in the future—definitely not heavy machine guns. They're an Illuminate hoax invented by the Cyberstan propaganda council and spread by pamphlet-wielding bugs, which are totally real—my democracy officer tells me that I've seen them myself. Our guns are perfectly fine, especially now they'll no longer boot you to your desktop.

Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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