'Helldivers' Bug Wipes Out All Player Progress

Barely a week after its March 3 launch, Arrowhead Game Studios' top-down co-op shooter "Helldivers" has run into a fairly serious problem. Gamers have reported a fair number of day-one bugs with the game, but the one faced by PS4 owners is by far the worst of the lot with some serious implications. PlayStation 4 users have found that the game inexplicably erases all in-game progress if the controller's battery runs empty for any reason.

Users whose controllers died in the midst of playing the PlayStation-exclusive game found their character respawning as a barebones level-one version after the controller had been recharged and reconnected. VG247 points out that the consequences of this bug go beyond just immediate loss of progress since the last checkpoint. If gamers play through to the next checkpoint, the respawned level-one character will permanently overwrite and replace the levelled up character.

This insidious bug can potentially take away several hours of effort and hard work if gamers aren't vigilant enough. The best solution in that case is to cut the losses and reset the game. That way, gamers stand to lose only the progress since the last checkpoint. That's still a better option compared to losing the long hours put into levelling up the player character. More importantly, it pays to keep your controller fully recharged before playing the game.

Worse yet, controller disconnection isn't the only means to lose your character's progress. Gamers on the official PlayStation forums have cited other seemingly inexplicable triggers to the same bug that wipes out all progress. Some have reported the problem after playing couch (offline) co-op, whereas others have experienced loss of progress on the PS Vita version of the game as well. Other persistent bugs with the game include issues with transferring save data between PS Vita and PS4 and problems with match-making and the getting into online co-op in general, according to Kotaku.

Meanwhile, the developer Arrowhead Game Studios has confirmed the existence of the reset and other assorted bugs on the "Helldiver" subreddit. In a huge post replete with FAQs to help out beleaguered gamers with their problems, the developer has confirmed that it is currently working towards ironing out these post-launch wrinkles through the 1.03 patch. Unfortunately, the developer hasn't provided any specific launch date or an estimate as to when it would be able to furnish the much-needed update.

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HELLDIVERS Announce Trailer (credit: PlayStation YouTube channel)