Helldivers 2 dev finally fixes difficulty mode bug that affected a million players

Over a million Helldivers 2 players should finally be able to play the game on higher difficulty levels again thanks to a major bug fix by Arrowhead Game Studios.

Considering how popular and successful Helldivers 2 has been, it’s been awfully buggy since its February launch. One notorious issue that lingered for over a month is a bug that prevented some players from accessing higher difficulty levels despite meeting the requirements to unlock them. Arrowhead did provide a workaround, but it sounds like the bug should be well and truly fixed now, at least for some players.

In a post on the official Helldivers 2 Discord channel, then shared via Reddit, developer Spitz explained how the team has recently gone through “a bunch of manual progression requests” to fix the issue for roughly 1,300,000 players. While that’s certainly good news, it came with an unfortunate downside. According to Spitz, the sheer amount of these requests “caused a bit of a backup in the system,” one that’s led to “hiccups” in other areas of Helldivers 2, specifically store purchases and other account features.

As such, Spitz has assured Helldivers they’ll resolve the remaining requests in smaller batches over the next day or so. If you’ve encountered the bug yourself, it’s absolutely worth checking to see if you have access to higher difficulties now. If not, you’ll need to wait a little longer, but it should be resolved sooner rather than later.

A few Reddit users in the comments confirmed they’re no longer affected by the bug, with OriginalGoatan and RedditorsAreAssss saying they suddenly unlocked new difficulty modes after completing missions. The majority are grateful to see the bug fixed and empathetic to Arrowhead’s commitment to fixing Helldivers 2’s myriad issues. On the contrary, Redditor lelel86 expressed concern the game has “gotten a bit too big and out of their league” because of this issue.

Helldivers 2 was one of 2024’s biggest surprises so far. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt admitted in February the game was “blowing through the estimates” in terms of sales, with analyst Doug Creutz (via Bloomberg) estimating the game sold least eight million copies. You’d think that would make Arrowhead an attractive acquisition target for publisher Sony, but Pilestedt has already denied rumors of his studio being bought out by the PlayStation company.