Quick summary for anyone who can't watch the video, with descriptions taken from the accompanying news post on the Steam store page:
- releases April 11th
- new armors and matching capes
- CE-07 Demolition Specialist (light)
- CE-27 Ground Breaker (medium)
- FS-55 Devastator (heavy)
- no info on what bonus each set has
- new primary weapons
- BR-14 Adjudicator (marksman rifle) - "Deliver righteous judgement to your enemies with accuracy. This armour-penetrating assault rifle is best used against smaller groups."
- CB-9 Exploding Crossbow - "Kaboom! Enjoy powerful exploding bolts that dish out max damage upon direct impact. Gravity must be accounted for when aiming."
- R-36 Eruptor (explosive) - "Keep your distance… this bolt-action rifle fires jet-assisted shells that explode shrapnel in all di-rections upon impact. All directions. Even your face."
- new grenade and secondary weapon
- G-123 Thermite grenade - "This little beauty can stick to surfaces before burning up to a toasty 2000°C."
- GP-31 Grenade Pistol - "Does what it says on the label – a pistol that fires grenades. Don’t forget to reload between shots though."
- new booster
- Expert Extraction Pilot Booster - "Need to get out of a jam fast? This booster lowers the time it takes for the extraction shuttle to reach the extraction beacon. Home in time for dinner."
Edit: added link to Steam store page news post and summarized info from the same
It's a fair criticism, persistent crashes can definitely suck the fun out of a game. I'm experiencing more crashes now than I was a month ago, which is not the direction things should be going. While I'm pleased with the pace of content releases, I'd really like to see better stability in what they're releasing. The most recent one I've seen is a really common crash during the extraction animation. This one was hitting my usual group at the end of roughly half our games last. It was happening so frequently that it really makes me wonder how such a bug makes it into a release.
I will mention two troubleshooting steps that have seemed to help me. If you're on PC, try these to see if it improves your experience any:
%appdata%\Arrowhead\Helldivers2\shader_cache\pipeline_library.cache. This change has appeared to have a very positive impact for me in a few instances. You will likely notice more stuttering after clearing the cache as shaders are compiled in the background, but it should stabilize after a few minutes.After experiencing several crashes yesterday, I went through both troubleshooting steps last night and had no crashes across several missions tonight. Can't guarantee it'll help in your case, but it's worth a shot.
And that's not to say it really absolves Arrowhead of a responsibility to fix these particular problems. The fact that file verification and shader cache flush seem to resolve so many of my crashes indicates that they have serious problems they need to solve related to client patching and shader management.
I had zero crashes before and since the update that "eliminated" the extraction crashes I have the issues now too. The same for 4 of the 6 people I play with. The other 2 had the crashes before and now still have them. So now having them not host the game isn't helping any ore either.
Such a shame.