News

Hell Let Loose QA Reproduces Severe FPS Drops, but the Cause Is Still Unknown

The team is testing the performance problem while expanding work on the Level 1 loadout issue into 2027.

0 2 2 minutes read

A ruined village street in Hell Let Loose, with damaged buildings and trees.

Hell Let Loose’s developers have reproduced the severe, temporary FPS drops players have reported since Update 21, but QA has not found their cause. In Dev Brief #222, the team says the drops can last several seconds before performance returns, and reports have come from both PC and console. Targeted performance tests are underway, with the investigation ranked among the team’s highest priorities.

The latest brief moves from the immediate post-Update 21 concerns covered in the previous Update 21 feedback discussion to longer-running problems that still need more diagnosis.

The Level 1 loadout problem has no fix date

When the Level 1 issue occurs, players can temporarily appear to have lost their progression after joining a match. Previously unlocked loadouts remain unavailable until the game reloads the player’s progression data.

The developers had added logging to investigate the problem, but have struggled to reproduce it consistently. They initially suspected crashes were a main trigger. Player reports have since pointed to other circumstances too, including ordinary game launches, map changes, and transitions between matches.

The team plans to devote more time to the issue as part of its wider quality-of-life and bug-fixing work going into 2027. It has not given a fix date, saying the problem needs dedicated engineering and QA work rather than a quick, isolated correction.

Update 22 includes memory work on Juno Beach and Smolensk

Crashes and freezes have multiple causes, and the developers say a large share of the crashes they currently see, particularly on console, involve memory usage. For Update 22, optimization work is underway on Juno Beach and Smolensk, covering both runtime performance and memory. Some changes are intended to help across several maps, while others target specific environments. The team cautions that this work will not resolve every kind of crash.

Microstuttering is a separate concern from the longer FPS drops. It refers to brief hitches players may notice while moving through the world. The game’s large maps require it to update and process nearby objects as players move, which can cause those pauses. The developers say reducing and grouping objects can lessen the effect, but the game’s architecture makes it an ongoing optimization task rather than a single-fix problem.

The team is also looking into newer reports of performance drops when aiming down sights. It wants players to include their platform, map, and weapon when reporting those cases, which may help determine whether they match an earlier ADS issue or have a different cause.

Hit registration depends on more than one system

The developers say apparent hit-registration problems can involve player connection quality, server performance, the timing of server and client updates, or the game’s underlying architecture. An unstable connection can also make the client display an action differently from how the server processes it. When reporting a suspected hit-registration problem, players can note whether the game displayed a network warning at the time.

Update 22 will arrive in November with Lake Balaton and a new vehicle type. The developers say ongoing work on server, map, and general performance should make communication between clients and servers more consistent, though they have not presented that as a single fix for hit registration.

Reports to the Hell Let Loose Support Team are most useful when they include the platform, map, server population, what happened immediately beforehand, whether the problem can be repeated, and any video, screenshots, or in-game network warnings. The developers are also reviewing VOIP reliability, visual and audio effects, network desync, Tactical Map behavior, and other interface and gameplay bugs.

Which of these issues has affected your Hell Let Loose matches most? Follow the continuing investigations and November Update 22 news on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.

Fight in the most iconic battles of the Second World War, including El Alamein, Stalingrad, Omaha Beach, and Foy! This is combat at a whole new scale.. with lumbering tanks dominating the battlefield, and crucial supply chains fuelling the frontlines, you are a cog in the machine of colossal combined arms warfare. Hell Let Loose puts you in the chaos of war, complete with deep player-controlled vehicles, a dynamically evolving front line, and crucial unit-focused gameplay that commands the tide of battle.