Helldivers 2 players crack the code of “insidious” long-term bug

Shane Black
A screenshot from the game Helldivers 2

The Helldivers 2 community finally found the cause of a bug that has plagued the game since its launch.

For months, players have been pulling their hair out over an issue that forces characters to stop sprinting at random. Without knowing the cause, fans were left confounded as to what exactly was going on.

However, this may be changing, as one Helldivers 2 player discovered the bug’s source and shared their findings on the game’s subreddit. Further testing by other users suggests the Redditor has indeed unlocked a monthslong mystery.

In their post, the Redditor mentions their extensive experience in software development and provides their thoughts on the number of patches Helldivers 2 has received.

The big revelation, however, doesn’t come until the end of their post, where they reveal the cause of the sprinting bug.

“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.”

Given how long this problem has terrorized the Helldivers community, this comment immediately caught people’s attention, inspiring them to conduct their own tests.

The results of these experiments seem to reinforce the theory, with one user reporting, “I couldn’t believe it at first, because this has been plaguing me since day one it feels like. After I saw this post I went into a couple games and tried it. Sure enough, every time I popped a stim my allies slowed to match.”

Others seem to have been able to specify the problem even further, with another Helldivers 2 fan commenting, “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.”

This comment was accompanied by a short video clip to show how the player on keyboard was affected, but not the one using a controller.

Though all of this testing is far from official, the results suggest that using Stims is somehow causing Helldivers 2’s sprinting bug.