AH Official Stance Hitting A Bit Too Hard This Time
As many of you know, Helldivers' 6.2.2 patch rendered non-Windows players across the world flat-out unable to play the game. This is because of a series of graphics driver checks they added that were intended to "help address potential issues caused by out of date drivers". To reiterate: the inability for non-Windows players to start the game were specifically because of Arrowhead's decision to try and manage graphics driver maintenance on the user's behalf. And, by extension, the way that they actually implemented said driver checks.
Their wording during the initial days of this issue implied that they were putting substantial effort into resolving the issue. Sure enough, a Proton Hotfix was released almost a week later, and Arrowhead announced that they'd fixed the problem.
Except... that's not entirely true.
For many players, the issue still persists. I know because, despite switching to the Proton Hotfix, my copy of Helldivers crashes during the nProtect GameGuard validation checks. I've also been scouring forums to try and find a solution, discovering a variety of alternatives that clearly aren't consistent in their efficacy.
I've tried verifying file integrity for both Helldivers and Proton. No success. I tried clearing my Proton shadercache. No success. I've tried swapping over to the Proton Experimental [bleeding edge beta] branch. No success. With every option I found, there were numerous other players reporting a similar lack of success with the method in question.
I reached out to Arrowhead Support as a last-ditch effort. This screenshot is their official and only response: "it is up to Proton devs to release something that fixes this for players".
No clarifying questions. No request for additional information. No suggestions on what I could try. Not even a promise to update their Known Issues list. Just this. A response that, as far as I can tell, is meant to assert that this isn't their problem, and thus, not their responsibility. Despite the clear and obvious fact that it was 100% caused by a change that was unnecessary and potentially even poorly implemented.
Thanks for making me feel like a valued player, Arrowhead.