Helldivers 2 patch makes its absurdly hard defence events easier, but ups the challenge at higher difficulties

Helldivers 2 has endured another chaotic weekend, with developer Arrowhead Game Studios taking the drastic step of capping the game's player count players to help servers cope with demand following its stratospherically popular launch. In the midst of all that, however, the studio also dropped a more general patch to address several other issues. Patch 01.000.009 "continues the focus on stability and matchmaking", adding numerous fixes for crashes and. But it also makes a much needed tweak to the difficulty of one particularly brutal mission.

This is the Defend Event that was added to the game last week following the invasion of several human-controlled planets by the game's automaton faction. The mission notionally involves escorting citizens to safety while repelling attacks from the game's crimson-eyed robots. But in its initial form, you'd be lucky if you could even get those citizens out the door. I tried a Defend mission late last week on the game's medium difficulty (the third-lowest difficulty out of nine levels) and the automaton assault was so intense that it was a struggle simply to stay alive.

Anyway, the patch reduces the frequency of bot drops on the mission to make it more manageable. But what democracy giveth, democracy taketh away, as the game's difficulty has been increased in several other areas. Eradicate missions, which involve clearing bug nests/automaton factories, have been made harder, although the mission timer has also been increased by four minutes, which should make completing  side objectives more viable in these scenarios. Meanwhile, the three hardest mission difficulties—Suicide Mission, Impossible, and Helldive have also been made tougher.

Elsewhere, the patch also updates the Mission End screen to display Experience and Requisition multipliers, and stops multiple players from bringing the same stratagems into a mission. As for those crashes, players should no longer be cast back to the desktop during the cryogenic defreeze cutscene when joining another player's game, when shooting in ADS mode using the SMG-37 defender, when accepting an invite from another player, and in various other instances.

You can read the full patch notes here. The notes also highlight numerous issues that the developers are currently working on, such as players being disconnected during play, and rewards and progression either failing to be displayed or attributed. The biggest bugbear, of course, remains the ability to play the game in the first instance, which the notes address at the outset, stating "We know this is the highest urgency for most players and we treat them very seriously."