Helldivers 2 has exploded, both literally and figuratively. Since the game launched earlier this month, players have been having tons of fun blasting bugs and bots to bits. It was released for PlayStation 5 and Windows on 8 February 2024, and it’s been a hell of a ride since then. And now, with all that success, comes a ton of new interested players. Just check out the intro video below and get a good laugh to start your day.

And that brings in a very common question for PC gamers. What are the Helldivers 2 system requirements? The follow-up to indie hit Helldivers has spawned a cult-like following with its very campy lampooning of militarism and capitalism. The extremely over-the-top warfare and bloodshed serve as a great vehicle for fun with your friends, all while laughing at the dumb bugs.

Here are the Helldivers 2 system requirements:

The Helldivers 2 recommended specs are quite a bit higher than the minimums, as is normally expected. With this game, though, you may not see the performance improvement you expect with a higher-end rig.

Purpose-built gaming PCs from the last two-three years should be fine with this game at 1080p or even 1440p, depending on where you set your presets at. Mid-range PCs with something like a Ryzen 5 3600 and RX 6600XT should have little trouble running the game at 1080p, around medium settings. While you won’t really be able to crank the fidelity to much on such a rig, a fine 60+ FPS experience is in store for you.

One thing that’s pretty much a given for anyone is an SSD. This game really needs the help of fast storage to make up for code optimization shortfalls in streaming assets, so this 100GB title needs to live on a decent SSD to see the best possible framerates.

All that’s to say that there are issues worth bringing up. Players have been complaining about the servers over the last week, with constant issues even getting into games being experienced by many players.

Part of the reason for this issue is that the game was built on a fairly archaic game engine. Brought to our attention by Lead Game Developer Andy Touch, it turns out that the second installment in the Helldivers series is powered by something few people have ever even heard of. Both the original RTS and the sequel were built on an engine from 2015—Bitsquid. This engine is now known as Autodesk Stingray. The thing you have to know about this is that Autodesk Stingray is that it has been discontinued since 2018. This means support for new features and extensions has to be developed in-house.

Though the engine was built to support PCs and various consoles, using an older un-optimized engine has major drawbacks. For one thing, optimizations and improvements brought on by modern features like DLSS aren’t included and would need to be ported over. The age of the engine even calls into question whether such a thing can be done at all.  It’s also worth pointing out that the age of the engine may slow the pace of updates and fixes to the backend code, which may be contributing to server woes as well.

Despite these issues, the gamers are still having tons of fun joining the bloody fight for space-based—and totally not evil—democracy.

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