Is Helldivers 2 About to Break Its Four-Player Limit? Inside the Push for Bigger Squads

Helldivers 2 is a glorious mess of explosions and friendly fire, but there’s one hard limit on the chaos: you can only roll in with three buddies. Fans keep asking for bigger squads, and now we have a blunt answer on why that’s not happening anytime soon.

The short version: it’s performance, not preference

Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani jumped into the game’s official Discord to explain why the four-player cap is still the law of the land. He didn’t dance around it:

"My man, we’re trying to fix performance. not kill it."

"I can give you 16 player lobbies tomorrow. and 16 fps. want it?"

That’s not just a joke for effect. Jorjani and creative director Johan Pilestedt have said before that the current engine, netcode, and even the UI start sweating the second you talk about adding more people. Doubling the party size from four to eight wouldn’t be a quick flip; it would mean serious engineering work and a rebalance pass across multiple systems.

Why bigger squads are a headache right now

This isn’t a design hill Arrowhead wants to die on; it’s a technical one. The studio is prioritizing stability because the game is already juggling issues that players feel every day. More bodies on the field would multiply the problems, not the fun.

• Engine and network strain: The underlying tech and matchmaking backbone aren’t built to smoothly scale past four without major refits.
• UI workload: Even the interface needs rethinking to handle more players without turning into visual spaghetti.
• Balance fallout: Every stratagem, enemy spawn, and friendly-fire scenario would need recalibration to keep missions playable.
• Existing problems first: Crashes, freezes, FPS dips, and the occasional weapon gremlin are still in the mix, and Arrowhead wants those fixed before adding another stress test.

So, are bigger lobbies dead?

Not forever. Jorjani didn’t slam the door shut; he just made it clear the team isn’t going to burn the frame rate to make it happen. Think of the four-player cap as a safety rail for now, not a creative choice set in stone.

Could a 16-player lobby with overlapping airstrikes and orbital bombardments be hilarious? Absolutely. It would also light your GPU on fire at the moment. Until Arrowhead tightens up the performance side, the dream stays a dream and democracy travels with a tight squad, not a full platoon.