A month ahead of launch, the developers of co-op shooter Helldivers 2 have dropped two pleasing bits of news on Steam. One, the PlayStation-published game will support crossplay at launch, meaning anyone on PC will be able to party up with pals on the PS5 to shoot bugs in cross platform harmony. Two, the PC specs are refreshingly modest, at least for playing at 60 fps.
The Helldivers team put together a helpful chart that I'll embed below, but the key hardware asks are quite reasonable. For 1080p medium, Helldivers 2 recommends an Nvidia RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, which are four years old and two-and-a-half years old, respectively. Its recommended medium CPUs are also more than four years old. Stepping up to the 1440p "performance" tier bumps things up a bit, asking for an RTX 3070 / RX 6800 and a Core i5-12600K / Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Those are still fast graphics cards and CPUs, but well below the performance levels of the very latest from Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Only the ultra tier demands an RTX 40 series graphics card, and even then it's the 4070 Ti.
Compared to the likes of Alan Wake 2's brutal system requirements, Helldivers 2's don't offer much to stress about. Granted, it doesn't exactly look like Alan Wake 2, either, which stunned our hardware team with all the ray tracing bells and whistles turned on. Helldivers 2 looks quite good doing its own thing, though, with large environments and piles of enemies on-screen at once.
Sony's other PS5 exclusives coming to PC, including Returnal and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, have surprisingly had lower GPU requirements than Helldivers 2 asks for, though the expected specs take a leap upward if you enable ray tracing. We've been impressed with most of Sony's PC ports, though The Last of Us was unfortunately an absolute mess at launch. The first Helldivers ran well on PC, so hopefully this sequel follows suit.
It's somehow been nearly nine years since Helldivers came out, but if you compare the wide open third-person action of the sequel to the top-down shooting of the first game, you can see where that time went. You'll feel it on your HDD or SSD, too—Helldivers 2's steepest requirements is 100GB of free space, and it recommends an SSD for anything above the minimum spec.
I was about to declare that I expect Helldivers 2 to be the first big hit game of the year, but then I glanced at the list of upcoming 2024 games and realized how foolish that would be. Behind Enshrouded, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Tekken 8 and Palworld, Helldivers 2 may well be the fifth hit game of 2024. But I have a feeling Helldivers 2 will be the first co-op game this year to give Lethal Company some competition on Steam's most-played leaderboard—though for sheer player accessibility, it's hard to compete against a $10 game that asks for an eight-year-old GTX 1050, a graphics card that wasn't even particularly powerful when it came out.
