This would be the third weekend for Helldivers 2, the co-op multiplayer shooter that exploded in popularity in just days after launch, pushing the servers to max capacity in the last two weekends.
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilstedt tweeted that the max CCU (concurrent users) for the server has now been bumped to 700,000.
For reference, the first weekend of launch, Helldivers 2 has a max capacity of 250,000, and was bumped to 450,000 the next week.
However, Pilstedt warns that despite the bump in server capacity, it is expected that players will have to queue into the game still. So 750,000 CCUs is still not enough to get everyone who wants to play Helldivers 2 at the same time be able to do so. But the wait times should be less excruciating compared to last week.
The folks at Arrowhead sure are having a good problem, business-wise. But spare a thought to the engineers who have to make the game handle a larger than expected capacity in these couple of weeks. In another tweet, Pilestedt describes the work of the backend engineers as “tuning a vespa to compete in F1“, in other words, miracle workers. And there’s four full-time staff that have been handling this workload- ironically like a full squad of Helldivers spreading managed democracy. Or in this instance, managed server capacity.
Should you be able to get in the servers this weekend, expect a hell of a good time in Helldivers 2, as long as you’re not playing solo. It looks like the multiplayer issues (there were few days where reinforcing was bugged) and matchmaking issues are mostly fixed, so it should be easy to get into the ideal environment to experience Helldivers 2 at its best.
Helldivers 2 is a multiplayer shooter that does not play like any typical live service game, or any typical horde shooter. Check out our review here.
Helldivers 2 is out now on PS5 and PC (Steam).