"Helldivers 2": Developers suddenly lock out players with older CPUs
Some players with older CPUs are suddenly no longer able to play "Helldivers 2".
(Image: Arrowhead Games)
A game runs for months without any problems, and then suddenly nothing works at all: This is the situation some players of the online shooter "Helldivers 2" are currently experiencing on PC. Developer Arrowhead has apparently changed a query in the background so that users of older CPUs can no longer access the title.
This is reported by Eurogamer, among others. According to the report, Arrowhead performs a check for AVX2 support at the start of the game –. If the CPU installed in the PC does not support the vector command extension, the game will not run. This mainly affects CPUs that are more than ten years old. According to Eurogamer, a community manager from Arrowhead has now contacted us on Discord and promised a solution to the problem.
Communicative confusion
However, it is unclear how this situation came about in the first place. Volunteer moderators from the community had initially defended the block of older CPUs in the Discord chat, correctly pointing out that these processors do not meet the minimum requirements. However, there is a problem with this argument: "Helldivers 2" used to run on these systems anyway. Why this should now change more than a year after the release is not explained.
Later, a community manager wrote on Discord about a "solution to this problem" that was already in the works. This wording also allows for speculation as to whether this was a deliberate measure on the part of Arrowhead, which was subsequently recognized as a misstep, or simply an oversight from the outset. There is no timeline as to when players with older CPUs will be able to play "Helldivers 2" again.
Videos by heise
"Helldivers 2" is not an isolated case: "Civilization 7", which was released a few months ago, also requires AVX2 support for processors. However, unlike "Helldivers 2", the strategy game was not executable on older systems from the outset, which made the excitement about it somewhat more restrained. These cases also show that you have to take minimum hardware requirements seriously – and not just concentrate on the pure performance data.
(dahe)
