Arrowhead Finally Ditches Bitsquid — And No, It’s Not for Helldivers 2

Arrowhead quietly put up a new job listing last week, and it reads like the studio finally broke up with its high school sweetheart. They are hiring a Senior System Designer for their next game, and the fine print spells it out: Unreal Engine experience required, and the project is a brand-new co-op action IP. Not Helldivers 2. Not a sequel to anything. New game, new engine.

What that job post really says

Arrowhead has been glued to the same engine for basically its entire life. That engine started as Bitsquid back in 2009, got bought and rebranded as Stingray by Autodesk in 2014, and was discontinued a few years later. Arrowhead shipped most of its catalog on it anyway. Sixteen years later, this job listing is the studio finally saying: we are done.

• 2009: Bitsquid shows up as a lightweight, homegrown Swedish engine.
• 2014: Autodesk buys it, renames it Stingray, tries to take on Unity and Unreal.
• 2017: Autodesk admits the fight is over and pulls the plug.
• January 2018: Official discontinuation. No support. No updates. Nothing.
• Arrowhead titles on Bitsquid/Stingray: The Showdown Effect, the Gauntlet reboot, Helldivers, and Helldivers 2.
• Helldivers 2 actually started development around 2016—two years before Stingray was killed—so Arrowhead stuck with what it knew and just... kept going.

To their credit, the team has been honest about how rough that got. Chief Creative Officer Johan Pilestedt has said their engineers basically had to rebuild everything themselves without vendor support to reach parity with modern engines. And CEO Shams Jorjani did not sugarcoat the fallout:

'The technical debt was crippling—like trying to build a tower on foundations meant for a beach bungalow.'

Players felt it. When Helldivers 2 launched in February 2024—running on tech that had been legally dead for six years—it became, by all appearances, the most successful game ever shipped on a discontinued engine. It was also a headache: bugs, crashes, weird glitches, and a 141 GB install size on PC that a lot of fans pinned on Stingray’s limitations. The vibe in the community was basically: they kept bolting new parts onto a creaking machine and prayed each patch wouldn’t knock it over. The 'Into the Unjust' update mess didn’t calm anyone down, either.

From a dead engine to one with baggage

So now Unreal Engine 5. On paper: great. It is supported, documented, and constantly updated—everything Stingray was not. In practice: UE5 has its own reputation, and it isn’t flattering. Shader-compilation stutter, traversal hitches, PSO caching drama—if you have played a handful of recent UE games on PC, you have probably seen the same hiccups come and go while everyone argues about whose fault it is.

Epic says developers need to bake in pipeline steps like PSO precaching early and correctly. Developers counter that the system is easy to get wrong and not always well documented. Players don’t care; they just get stutter. Recent releases like Black Myth: Wukong, Silent Hill 2 Remake, and even Hogwarts Legacy (UE4, same root problem) all shipped with noticeable hitching on some setups. It is a known industry headache.

So Arrowhead is moving from an engine with zero lifeline to one with a big support network—but also a tendency to expose teams that don’t plan their optimization work from day one. If they nail the transition, the new game could be cleaner, more scalable, and way easier to maintain than anything they have done on Stingray. If they don’t, get ready for the usual UE jitters in place of the old Stingray gremlins. At least they won’t be shipping on a corpse this time.

Does Unreal solve Arrowhead’s problems or just swap them out for different ones? And will this new co-op game hitch less than Helldivers 2 crashed? I am rooting for them—but I have seen this movie before.