For 19 days, Helldivers 2 had a working first-person mode. Two free Nexus mods added it on October 1. On October 20, Arrowhead's patch 7.2.0 landed with Easy Anti-Cheat and, per the loader's author, a backend engine change that broke the script loader both mods run on. Players are now waiting on CowboyBingus to find a way back.
I haven't played either mod. This is based on the two Nexus pages, Arrowhead's Steam posts and the loader author's updates.
Two ways to play it as an FPS
Both mods went up on Nexus within an hour of each other on October 1. Both need CowboyBingus's Bingus Shared Loader, which runs Lua script mods inside the game.
| Mod | What it adds |
|---|---|
| First Person Perspective-HD2 by Th3ShadowDragon007 | First person on foot, in turrets, FRV seats and the Exo mech, with a glass or invisible cockpit by muchacho5894. Tanks stay third person. |
| Immersive First Person View by HAL9000 | A "COD-style first-person experience" with a visible body, 45–145 FOV and backward walking. |
Both pages address AI directly:
- Th3ShadowDragon007: "This mod is coded by hand and not AI-generated." Because it builds on the AI-made Bingus loader, the author also says they "consider this mod to be to some extent AI assisted", and Nexus tags it AI-Generated Content.
- HAL9000: the mod "was indeed completed with AI assistance." Nexus tags it AI Assisted. The author says the AI "only helped me find the meanings of the parameters I needed" and helped with loader questions.
What patch 7.2.0 broke
Arrowhead's announcement struck a conciliatory note. "We know mods are part of the DNA of PC gaming and gaming communities as a whole." It then warned that even harmless cosmetic mods might need updates from their creators. The backlash was immediate. PC Gamer counted 846 negative Steam reviews that day against 146 positive.
CowboyBingus wrote on Nexus on October 20 that, in preliminary testing, EAC itself didn't break his mods. The cause: "a significant engine update on the back-end which has impacted the way Lua mods in general function." His "Day 1" status update on Patreon went further:
"If you think about the way mods operate like a car, we've essentially had the entire engine of the car stripped from it."
His fix is a "bridge" DLL. Per his update, the game loads "any publicly trusted (even expired) signed DLL files" but blocks unsigned ones. Signing one himself would mean publishing "my full identity and location," so he has applied to SignPath, which signs open-source projects. His fallback is "sidestepping EAC."
On the first-person mod's page, one player summed it up: "I got to enjoy this for about a week and then Arrowhead killed LUA script mods."
What to watch for next is SignPath's answer. A signed bridge would bring back first person without asking players to work around the anti-cheat.
