HellForge – Offline HELLDIVERS 2 with a modding SDK

Stumbled upon this while looking at HELLDIVERS 2 mods.

To provide more context, HELLDIVERS 2 coop multiplayer 3rd person shooter game. It has been plagued by longstanding bugs or questionable game design choices. At some point, mods that fixes those bugs and provides other QoL starts to appear. Unfortunately, that also includes cheats and people running mods in public lobby.

~2 weeks ago the developer swapped the anti-cheat to EAC (which is infamous for being easy to bypass and more often than not causes issues instead). That update breaks existing mods. Also in that update, many players are seeing various crash and graphics glitch, regardless of using mods or not.

That leads to today, the umpteen times of review bombing in Steam, making HELLDIVERS 2 having mostly negative reviews.

In light of all that, I find it interesting that HellForge is a thing. Like, someone actually made it possible to have an alternative backend service, just enough to allow coop with friends. And you can mod it however you want since it's practically an offline copy.

I thought you would need a defunct online game to drive the reverse engineering or a source code leak for this to happen.