Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios has quickly rolled back a small patch— intended to smooth out server issues—after it was causing a noticeable performance drop on PC.
Patch 01.000.005 was pushed out on February 12, aiming to fix issues which were "mostly caused by having so many players in the game and server capacity creating unexpected behaviours." It was intended to make error messages more visible and make the entire process of getting into a server a bit smoother, as well as fix an issue that was causing some players to not receive their progression and mission rewards.
Unfortunately, taping over one leaky pipe seems to have caused another to burst. As reported by PCGamesN, the update ended up causing "significant degradation in performance," according to the team on Reddit. The issue was caught within just a couple hours of the patch going live, with a further update to the Reddit post informing that the team had decided to roll back the patch on PC for the time being.
The PlayStation 5 patch appears to have gone out some hours ago with seemingly little-to-no problem. There's currently no word on when the update will be implemented on PC again.
It's unfortunate that fixing one problem has generated more, but at least Arrowhead appears to be on the ball with the whole thing. It's a good job, too—Helldivers 2 is PlayStation's biggest PC launch by quite a margin, and while the initial days were pretty rough-looking the game is already in much better shape. My copium is telling me that if everything goes well for Helldivers 2 on PC in the coming weeks, it'll spell good things for the chances of more simultaneous releases in the future. As someone who used to mainline PlayStation games, I can only hope so.
