A member of Helldivers 2‘s community might have just unearthed the bizarre bug behind an issue that’s been leading PC folks to believe their keyboards might be faulty. Yup, if you’ve ever had your helldiver suddenly slow from a sprint to a jog without you doing anything, it turns out they may well just be feeling the effects of someone else’s stim.
While some players have been busy investigating this, they’ve been taking time out from the latest Major Order, which tasks folks with following up their valiant efforts in saving those poor Super Earth kids by, uh, killing some baby Terminids. Come on, stop feeling conflicted and get em’ in your sights.
The person who looks as though they’ve blown this case wide open claims to have “worked in the games industry for 20+ years” and did it just as an aside at the end of a lengthy post on the Helldivers 2 subreddit outlining why they’ve found the game’s lifespan so far quite interesting in terms of the issues that have cropped up.
“I’ll leave one final bug with you that I haven’t heard anyone call out,” they wrote, “Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly.”
While trusting someone not working on the game to have accurately unearthed the exact reason behind something that’s previously had legions of hardcores thinking their keyboards might be to blame might seem like a long shot, some players have quickly tested it out and provided a bit of evidence to back up the poster’s claim.
“Both players on PC, did not slow down a player sprinting with controller, but did slow them down when they switched to mouse and keyboard,” user MikeAmelung explained regarding the clip above, which definitely looks like to confirms the theory that folks in your squad injecting stims is what causes the animation to momentarily switch to a light jog, then immediately be restored to the sprint the player is pushing the input for.
While some have theorised that factors like the distance between you and the player injecting the stim and whether you’re serving as a host might also play into whether you’re affected, this definitely looks like something Arrowhead’ll want to add to its list of things to look into.
Also, in case you missed it, the studio’s CEO has recently outlined that it’s go no plans to create a dedicated co-op story mode for Helldivers 2, since that’d be akin to making a whole new game in terms of effort required.