Arrowhead implores Helldivers 2 players to temporarily stop using its most destructive weapon yet: Snowballs

Helldivers 2 warbond — (Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

War is hell, and the debasement and corruption of its participants only accelerates as humanity invents new, more spectacular, and more terrible weapons with which to prosecute it. Helldivers 2—with its arsenal of Breakers, Dominators, and Redeemers—is no different. But even Super Earth has limits, as Arrowhead has now implored Helldivers everywhere to refrain from using the game's most unintentionally destructive weapon of all: snowballs.

In a post to the Helldivers 2 Discord earlier today, Arrowhead community lead Katherine Baskin told troops to "avoid having snowball fights!" due to their sheer deadly potential. Not militarily deadly, mind you, technically deadly. It turns out that hucking snowballs around is crashing people's games for reasons unknown.

"We're aware of a crash caused by picking up and throwing snowballs," wrote Baskin, "We hope to have this fixed in the near future, but until then, we advise against snowball throwing!"

Which shouldn't be too devastating to the war effort, in all honesty. Although Helldivers 2's snowballs are apparently lethal to your game, they're less effective against Automatons and Terminids. They're more a way to kill time and energy on snowy planets like Heeth and Vandalon IV.

Players who have reported the bug up to now have mostly been on PS5, so far as I've seen, but there are scattered reports of PC players also running into hard crashes after flinging a snowball or two. It seems to at least be rarer on our platform of choice—some players say they can still throw as many snowballs as they want—but there's truly no reason to risk it.

After all, this one will probably be fixed soon. The previous Helldivers 2 patch, released earlier this week, fixed other crash-inducing bugs with the game's Arc weapons and Tesla Tower stratagem, and I imagine Arrowhead will be fast to work on this equally crash-happy issue. Being punted out of a game and losing all your progress and acquired knick-knacks is utterly infuriating. In fact, it's worse than that: It's undemocratic.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.