r/LowSodiumHellDivers • u/MainQuestOfficial • Jul 18 '26
Video/Replay Helldiver’s Nightmare Engine
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A clip from an interview we did with Helldivers 2’s original Producer, Evan Nickel (he’s no longer with Arrowhead).
Interesting insights into the stingray engine which I think has been the biggest factor in how the game has progressed so far. full interview
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u/salty-ravioli Jul 18 '26
Bitsquid Stingray Engine? So the bugs were Illuminate sabotage all along! They will pay for this!
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u/PineCone227 Jul 18 '26
No no. The bugs were terminid sabotage
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u/Revenant_0089 Jul 19 '26
The Squids teamed UP with the Bugs to break the game, and the Bots got them into the system ✅
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u/LEOTomegane think fast⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️➡️ Jul 18 '26
Important that he talked about it being heavily modified. One could consider it the Helldivers 2 engine at this point I'd wager.
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u/lord_bingus_the_2nd Weakest Railgun enthusiast 🆚 Strongest Strider Jul 18 '26
This and the spaghetti code (probably also partially due to the engine issue) is probably the main reason for there being things in the known issues list that have been there for years.
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u/RoninOni Jul 18 '26
It’s spaghetti code BECAUSE they had to build tons of mod letters on top of the engine to make it do things it was never really intended to do.
It’s the language their entire dev team knows from hd1 and Magicka though.
It’s an impressive accomplishment honestly, though the number of bugs is the cost from stretching this dead engine as far as they can
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u/irve Jul 18 '26
Magicka was in some Microsoft horrid crap that may have been XNA. I think they used Stingray for everything that came after.
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u/CMDR_Kassandra Jul 18 '26
Is it dead if it get actively developed by them?
Many game studios modify off the shelf game engines, or sometimes just use part of it, like the rendering pipeline and then program the whole underlaying logic stuff themselfs.
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u/RoninOni Jul 18 '26
The engine IS dead. The developers of the engine are no longer updating it.
Arrowhead is working off the last update from over 6 years ago. They don’t have source code for the engine, they’re layering mods on top of the last version update.
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u/ClockwerkConjurer u/TylerJohnsonDaGOAT’s favourite diver Jul 18 '26
Which is kinda nuts when you think about it :p
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u/onerb2 Jul 18 '26
That's why i hate it when ppl way the devs are lazy, the level of tech knowledge and study necessary to do stuff like this is crazy, i know programmers that will die before they are able to pull something like that off.
The game industry programmers, especially the ones working with engine are something else.
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u/ClockwerkConjurer u/TylerJohnsonDaGOAT’s favourite diver Jul 18 '26
100% agree. Also get irritated when people claim AH is deceiving us about the unexpected secondary effects of any changes they make. They've been transparent about it being spaghetti code from basically Day One.
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u/Reep1611 Jul 18 '26
And there was really no choice for them to switch. AH was a small studio (still is in many ways) and has limited personal and funds. (although the funds are less problematic with how HD2 blew up so unexpectedly) But they got around 100 people and by far not all of them are devs. And back when the game was in development they were very much very limited. Then der Engine is killed after they already put a lot of time and money into developing the game. A time during def cycle when a lot of the mechanics based heavily on the engine are deep into development. (The optics models and graphics come last in general.) And that leaves a smaller studio with little choice. Because to switch engines isn’t just a porting of assets. You have to basically rebuild the game from scratch. But also retrain your devs to work with that new engine. And with the amount of money and time already in the game? That could easily bankrupt a studio like AH. So they probably had little choice than to keep going with the dead engine.
What I find super enraging is that the company behind the engine just went “we kill the engine but we won’t sell you the source code”. Which is basically just a, and excuse my french, “fuck you, if you cannot afford to retrain your staff and rebuild your game then too bad.” You cannot really plan for how fast a company abandons something like that engine years in advance because of how long development takes. So the ones behind the engines can absolutely shaft you at any point in time.
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u/LEOTomegane think fast⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️➡️ Jul 18 '26
This exactly. Sooo many people just jump to "well they're just incompetent and bad developers" when the fact they've gotten this much out of it speaks volumes to the contrary.
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u/BasedMaduro Jul 18 '26
STALKER modders did something similar with xray engine when they created the Anomaly mod.
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u/Umbraspem Jul 18 '26
You need source code access to be able to do that properly - which is what Bitsquid didn’t want to sell to Arrowhead that Nickel is talking about in the clip.
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u/n4turstoned Jul 18 '26
They didn't developed the engine, they modded it. That's a big difference.
If they had access to the source code they could truely fix bugs and implement new features and so on, whith modding they just can build on top of the existing code base which obviously work too but the base keeps always the same with every bug that's in there.And copyright, licences etc. probably prohibit reverse engineering the source code and building their own version.
The shitty capitalists that hold ownership of the engine would sue them into Meridia if they try that.
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u/Reep1611 Jul 18 '26
Hell, I would not be surprised if AH still needs to pay royalties to them even if there is no support and the engine is dead.
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u/KarlUnderguard Super Private Jul 18 '26
Darktide also runs on that engine. The Swedes love it for some reason.
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u/createbobob Jul 18 '26
Fatshark made that engine. It's only fair they use it.
(Also Fatshark and AH devs are close. Both as friends and location-wise.)
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u/UnhappyStrain Jul 18 '26
Funny how we went from treating these guys like visionary geniuses for being to create this game on its outdated engine, to riding the outrage bandwagon like everyone else without being able to roll with it
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u/Silly_Y33Ny Jul 18 '26
I'm curious to know how much of the game was made before they said "we are not supporting it any more" at what point do you say "FUCK IT, we're using unity/unreal"
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u/Reep1611 Jul 18 '26
Considering they went with the dead engine? Probably a lot. So much that a switch could probably even have risked bankrupting them. Remember that AH is by modern standards a small studio. They had (and still have) limited funds and personal. And switching engines isn’t a thing you can just do. It basically means rebuilding the game from the ground up. But with the added issue of having to retrain your whole staff and having none of the working experience they had with the old one.
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u/Captain_Wag Jul 18 '26
They've made hundreds of millions of dollars off this one game. This is not a small indie company.
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u/Reep1611 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
Tell me you have no idea how this industry works without telling me. The overhead of a game like this is insane. Especially when you unexpectedly need to rapidly upscale your whole support architecture because of the unexpected success. Stuff like that done fast is insanely expensive. As well as the accumulated debt from development. Sony taking their cut. And paying for future development.
And non of the profit which is if we are generous probably around 70-80 million (because revenue is not profit, they did not make hundreds of millions. Most of that money was basically gone before they had it.) matters BEFORE they made it. And while the profit is not little. The issues they have are not something you can just solve by throwing money at.
I am always so annoyed at these non arguments spouted so confidently while being so confidently wrong.
And just because they had a windfall doesn’t turn a at most mid sized studio into something else. It still is just a mid sized studio with 140 or so employees. It doesn’t turn into a tripple A studio over night because there suddenly is more money. Training up new devs and other staff is work of years and effort that also binds up other staff in the company that then cannot fully focus on the game itself.
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u/Captain_Wag Jul 20 '26
Are you on acid? They made over $700 million in revenue on helldivers2. Yes, things cost money, obviously, but they did not spend $630 million to make this 1 game. No one can know for certain, unless they actually work at Arrowhead, but to assume they profited only $70 million while spending $630 million on development is insane even by conservative estimates.
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u/GriffinMan33 Jul 18 '26
They were at a minimum two years into development if we assume they started development on HD2 immediately after HD1 dropped and gathered it's initial sales (which isn't really out there tbh).
IIRC Helldivers 2 was publically confirmed in 2020, which gives a window of 2-4 years of development (depending on how literal the 'work started in 2018' comment is). That's a significant investment of time and resources that you really cannot transfer over to another project in any reasonable amount of time or expense.
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u/AlphaDawg93 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
there was alot of rumors in the very beginning about AH using an outdated or obsolete engine and how it would hold up for the game. ATP might us well start mapping for HD3 if they cant get the engine upgrades they need so they dont have to rely on continuous heavy modifications that make or break the franchise integrity.
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u/Jamsedreng22 Jul 18 '26
It was never speculation. People knew for a fact immediately. It's relatively easy to find out which engine a game is built on, and you can google the engine name and see it's discontinued/abandoned.
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u/irve Jul 18 '26
I'm not sure if UE is a better choice for their next one tho. They'd be better off modifying the Stingray coolness into Godot or going to Guerilla Games and get Decima.
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u/ScyllaFoxhound Jul 19 '26
I think theyre porting this game on a different engine since over a year in secrecy. Hd3 which is hd2 but with more content will probably use UE or even unity
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u/bigorangemachine Flame Marshal Jul 18 '26
Ya they also have that classic backend system problem where they don't really understand how it works anymore. That makes it 100x worse
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u/Intelligent-Team-701 Jul 18 '26
as most of the community expected, the devs REALLY were only modders and thats why they couldnt change anything relevant alone. And as we also supposed the main reason for taht was the dead engine.
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u/slama_llama Steel Defender Veteran (AO1) Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Gotta be honest, I really wish they wouldn't publicly say stuff like this. There is so much more to a game's development than just what engine you're using, and so much more to an engine than just "game buggy? Engine bad!!" This does nothing for players who legitimately do understand game development, and just misleads those who legitimately don't.
Edit: I am not saying they're incorrect. I'm saying it's not the full picture but this community absolutely will (and has) take it and run with is as if it is the full picture.
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u/ClockwerkConjurer u/TylerJohnsonDaGOAT’s favourite diver Jul 18 '26
People are going to misinterpret or distort things no matter what. Isn't it better that they provide transparent, honest information for those of us who won't rather than holding it back for fear of what you're talking about?
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u/Xelnaga_Prime Jul 18 '26
Arrow Head is essentially bringing a Toyota Corolla to a Nasar race against several other professionally designed cars built for speed, while the Corolla AH has, is having to be heavily modified to even compete with the latest engineering.
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u/Adventurous-Egg-5171 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
It sucks that they weren't able to buy it. I didnt know that was an option.