It might be April Fools’ Day today, but Helldivers 2 has recieved an actual patch. It’s just a little one, is patch 01.002.202, but there is one fix in it that’s caught my eye, given what’s been going on with the game on PC lately.
As a quick refresher, since the last big patch, 01.002.200, made some changes to how the game does AI calculations, some PC players on older systems have reported that they’re now unable to play the game without crashes. Arrowhead confirmed last week that it’s working on a fix for this “AVX2 issue”.
Enter patch 01.002.202, and the fix it makes that caught my eye. “Fixed game crashing on legacy hardware when player drops into a mission,” the line laying out that tweak reads.
As of writing, we can’t be sure that this fix is specifically aimed at that AVX2 issue, since it obviously doesn’t mention AVX2 specifically, but the use of “legacy hardware” would appear to potentially match what’s been going on, as the AVX2 problem has mainly affected folks using older CPUs manufactured prior to around 2013/2014.
VG247 has reached out to Arrowhead via email, as well as community manager Katherine ‘Baskinator’ Baskin (who posted both the announcement of today’s patch and that Arrowhead was working on an AVX2 fix) and one of Arrowhead’s player support agents via Discord in order to try and get concrete confirmation as to whether this fix is related to or designed to rectify the AVX2 issue.
For now, trying to read into what various players are posting in the channels of Helldivers 2’s Discord server, it’s difficult to tell for 100% certain whether this patch has changed anything for everyone who was struggling to run the game on their older PCs. That said, I have noticed a couple of players indicating that it has improved things in their specific cases.
“AVX2 problem seems to be fixed. Playing difficulty 4 bot mission. Was never able to go above 2”, one with the handle Wendigoez/SEAF Hellbomb Manufacturer who claims to be using a 12 year old CPU has written, while another with the handle Anoth/SES Sword of the Stars has asserted: “Arrowhead made it.. I can play the game again with my old ass CPU.”
We’ll have to see if these turn out to be isolated cases or if this patch has quietly fixed the AVX2 issue. Can you now play Helldivers 2 again on your old ass PC? Let us know below!
