Helldivers 2 devs Arrowhead pull new Rupture Strain bugs offline for five weeks to fix their, er, bugs

Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have opted to pull a recently deployed variant of the shooter’s Terminid bugs offline for five weeks, in order to fix issues with them. Yep, for now you can dive onto planets like Oshaune and explore some Into the Unjust update caves without having to worry about burrowing bugs jumping out to mercilessly kick your bottom.

Rupture Warriors have been the main source of Rupture Strain ire since their arrival at the start of this month, as their ability to pop out of the Earth and instantly murder unsuspecting troops has proven tough to counter. At first, those hosting sessions were most at risk of dying like this, but Arrowhead’s attempt to rectify the issue in Tuesday’s patch seemingly put everyone in each party in an equal amount of danger, though some players did dispute this was the case.

Fast forward to now, and the studio have decided the best option is to sub the Rupture Strain out for a little while, until they can return in a more palatable form. “Our patch yesterday combined with other issues regarding the balance of the Rupture Strain have made them function in a way we did not intend,” Arrowhead community manager Katherine ‘Baskinator’ Baskin announced on the game’s Discord server. “We’re going to take the Rupture Strain offline…No other units will be affected. The improved Rupture Strain will be back online in 5 weeks.”

So, there you go, as of 5PM BST on September 17th, the Rupture Strain’s been put back in its box, and will stay there for just over a month while the devs try to persuade those warriors to give folks with machine guns and bombs a fair chance.

A comment an Arrowhead QA lead going by Jojo made in the Discord a couple of days ago sheds a bit more light as to what’s happened since the patch arrived and the Rupture Warriors started mercilessly murdering everyone, rather than just session hosts. Apparently the host focusing quirk was down to a “networking issue” that Arrowhead opted to rectify.

“That is a lot more straightforward to fix then tweaking the attacks and was causing some networking issues,” the developer explained. “So it’s unfortunate that the fix means more people are getting hit by an arguably unfair attack, but it was a needed fix. We are looking into how the rupture enemies have landed but thats a broader issue.”

That look’s clearly convinced the studio that this pulling of the enemies offline is the best course of action, so here’s hoping that when they come back online, the issue of their overtuned attacks making them very unpopular to play against will have been taken care of for the long-term.

Bugged bugs aren’t the only problem Arrowhead have had to grapple with after deploying Into the Unjust, with the days following its arrival plagued by technical gremlins that, to be fair, the studio were quick to say they’d try to sort, even if they weren’t keen on doing a patch that only featured performance tweaks.