Helldivers 2 has burst onto the scene with an unprecedented amount of success. More so than even developer Arrowhead Game Studios could imagine. The co-op shooter has blowed through over 450,000 concurrent players on Steam, and last weekend, Arrowhead reportedly 700,000 concurrent players across PC and PS5.
Among all the server issues and complaints about waiting times, though, some intriguing information about Helldivers 2‘s game engine has come out. Most games today run on either Unreal Engine or Unity, but Arrowhead’s latest hit runs on something bafflingly archaic.
Helldivers 2 Runs On “Abandonware”
Remember those obscure Swedish indie games of the early 2010s, built on a little-known engine called Bitsquid? Well, you might be surprised to learn that this is the engine (albeit a massively upgraded version of it) that powers the smash-hit Helldivers 2.
While industry giants like Unreal Engine and Unity dominate the scene, Bitsquid, which was acquired by Autodesk in 2014 and rebranded to Autodesk Stingray, was only around until Autodesk pulled the plug in 2018. Despite the engine’s demise, Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 and Fatshark, the creators of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, continue to champion Stingray.
Arrowhead CEO and game director, Johan Pilestedt, corroborated the report from game development blog 80 Level that revealed they were utilizing the “abandonware” engine for the co-op shooter.
This is true. Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.
And yes. The project started before it was discontinued.
https://t.co/mz61TnYNGN— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) February 21, 2024
Making a visually compelling game in 2024 using an out-of-date engine with zero support is a testament to the sheer talent Arrowhead Studio possesses. Not only that, they built on top of Stingray to support their needs. It took 8 years, but their efforts paid off in an incredibly successful game.
Arrowhead’s Allegiance To Stingray, Explained
You may be thinking – why is Arrowhead sticking with a dead engine? Unreal Engine 5 is modern, more popular, and actually has support behind it. So why is the studio insistent on using Stingray?
The answer lies in familiarity and expertise. For Arrowhead, Stingray isn’t just Helldivers 2‘s engine; it’s their toolset for over 16 years, powering games like The Showdown Effect, the Gauntlet reboot, as well as the first Helldivers. Switching engines can be incredibly disruptive, especially when a team has mastered a specific system.
Loyalty also plays a role. Arrowhead and Fatshark seem particularly close to the engine’s creators, Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson, who previously founded Bitsquid after the closure of another Swedish studio. These two outfits were among the very first to utilize Bitsquid commercially.
Even after its official demise, Arrowhead and Fatshark remain committed to Stingray and even supported Frykholm and Persson’s new engine venture, Our Machinery. However, that venture met a peculiar end, with the creators abruptly shutting it down just a year after release.
This raises an interesting question – with all the modifications and updates Arrowhead has made to Stingray over the years, at what point does it cease to be the original engine and become something entirely new? Is Helldivers 2 truly running on Stingray, or has it evolved into its own unique entity?
The story of Helldivers 2 and its reliance on the defunct Bitsquid engine is a unique one, and proves that there’s much more to a studio’s use of a particular engine than just pretty graphics.
