Helldivers 2 Has Been Transformed: Player Counts Just Soared

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[sunniedunbar]

Funny fact. Less headshot damage but more limb damage made the bugs deadlier overall.

[WilltehGreat]

The problem with the "rely on your stratagems" line was that so many of the high difficulty dive modifiers were things that made stratagems fewer in number or harder to call in.

[CoCoNOFox]

The problem wasnt the hard counters the problem is that it felt into having too many things that are "If you use this you are stupid"

[BasiCitizen]

They can always make level 11+ difficulty for those that really want the challenge. People flocked to the game at launch because it was fun. Let people have fun.

[NanashiCAST]

I wouldn't go to the extremes of calling it a power fantasy but easing off on the rock paper scissors bullshit is nice.

[LostWallet]

I think balance in the game should be “using this gun will make you kill this enemy easier and more efficient” rather than “using this gun will be the only way to kill this enemy” reward players for making good decisions rather than punishing players who made bad ones

[ianhowe]

It’s cool that all those people came back and it’s not even for new content or a new”season.”
All they did was fix the game and an extra 50K rush back to play. It’s impressive that so many divers are even engaged enough to hear that the game has been fixed. It’s not like they announce Helldivers news on CNN.

[paulroberto]

The new update is so much fun! It really feels like launch again. It's so much fun experimenting with all the weapons again, to see how they perform after the buffs. It feels way more fair now. Yesterday we got so many more hulks in our lv8 game, but we had the weapons to take them out! Spear now one shotting them for example. It's a breath of fresh air, and shows that ArrowHead is actively listening to their community. It's just unfortunate how much damage the last major patch (escalation of freedom) did.

[jamesdykes]

I love how you said "hard counter". No, only four guns were viable, that's not a hard counter, it's a meta.

[royconestoga]

Make a game not a chore to play and more people will play it. Not exactly rocket science.

[Khotetsu]

The big issue the community had was that Arrowhead broke their own "hard counter" design. Instead of having multiple tools to counter specific situations, there was 1 tool and 2 or 3 other ones that had been nerfed out of being capable of doing their intended job, sometimes because they were unintentionally good at filling another role, like the flamethrower being nerfed to stop being good against armor and becoming useless against hordes as a result.

For anti-armor, you had the EAT, the recoilless, and the SPEAR. Except the SPEAR had major issues with locking on and even when it hit it took at least 2 shots to kill, meaning that a full pack could only kill 2 or 3 targets and you needed to spend time reloading to take down 1. So that left the EAT and recoilless, but the recoilless was less useful for similar ammo reasons as the SPEAR - it has a lengthy reload and limited carry capacity, which meant that the EAT would give you more rounds over a period of time, meaning the only situations where the recoilless was better was if you needed more than 2 shots in under a minute and had the time to stop and reload. The railgun could fill that role as well, but then they nerfed it and nobody could find a situation where the railgun was worth taking over something that did that job better. It was useless against chaff and outclassed by the auto-cannon or anti-material rifle for medium targets.

[Djghorab]

still waiting and hoping that region block on helldivers getting removed
I REALLY WANT TO BUY IT, GOD DAMN YOU SONNNY.😥

[alyasVictorio]

Up next: Please UNBLOCK all these blocked regions so everyone can play Helldivers 2 too so badly

Edit: I think I got more replies than usual/normal before 😳. Don't mind this edit paragraph, mind only this comment above 😅

[AntonsVoice]

The hardest difficulties of helldivers could easily be the hardcore milsim mode. If people are still goofing off, and winning, make harder difficulties. No, don't make the "current" difficulties harder, make entirely new and harder difficulties

[cool-soap]

helldivers is the "its all over-WE ARE SO BACK!" meme lol

[GnarledStaff]

They fixed the game and it went from “its fun to cheese the enemies and find ways around the mechanics” back to “its fun to engage the enemies and play the game”.

The original visions did not mesh with the game design. They wanted a milsim style game which are generally characterized by quick TTK, built enemies designed for a slow TTK horror survival type gameplay and added quick respawns, silly over the top deaths, fast movement speed and satire. Then they put in hordes of enemies that spawned really close to the player.

The game looked and played like a casual coop shooter, especially at lower levels. But the actual optimised gameplay was a special forces style stealth operation based around avoiding as many enemies as possible. This was fun for the optimizers who enjoyed learning and abusing game mechanics but was generally less fun than directly engaging enemies.

The studio then doubled down and discouraged engaging enemies by nerfing weapons that provided good counterplay to certain enemies, chargers in particular, making the most fun part of the game (fighting enemies) feel worse, effectively undermining their core gameplay loop.

There were other changes as well, such as increased accuracy for bots, and glitches like enemies shooting through walls that made the combat less fun, particularly for more casual players.

So the update basically fixed their core gameplay loop by allowing casual players to engage the enemy directly again, changing the main strategy from “run away and hide” to “fight enemies”.

If you want to go stealth, its still a good option, and probably the best option, but it no longer feels like the option the devs are trying to force you to do.

Edit: I do the think stealth was the actual option the devs wanted players to use. I think they wanted 4 man teams that highly coordinated. Because 4 people working together really well actually made the game easier than stealth, but getting even 2 people to work together can be difficult when you are playing with random strangers. The game was not designed to encourage teamplay beyond a few mechanics like team reloading. Enemies were designed to break up teams because the devs assumed players would stick together and play as coordinated teams because the previous game forced them to by having everyone on 1 screen. This game lacked things like classes or roles, which could have enforced that behavior, instead seemingly putting feeedom at the forefront, which is a consistent theme among games that go viral. Skyrim, Minecraft, etc. a lot of the really big games focus on letting players do things their own way.

Which is a long winded way of saying its fun again and Helldivers is back!

[evanulven]

Game designers need to get it through their skulls. Yes, design matters. Direction matters. Balance matters. "Vision" got the game rolling in the first place.

The moment a game, especially an online one, goes live, it stops being all about whatever the devs want or think the game should be. Players now have input, and it's arguably more important than whatever the designers and developers want or think. Artistic vision and intended design are all well and good, but if large numbers of your players are saying both suck, than it's time to take a step back.

[itsyaboiguzma]

Damn its crazy its like actively buffing weapons the community has been asking for instead of nerfing any viable strategy or weapon through the floor was the better course of action.

[NoTAdrian]

I don't think that Helldivers 2 is a power fantasy now. You can easly be killed, the thing is that you can use more than 3 weapons and stratagems in the game.

[angmori]

Arrowhead accidentally made the wrong game for the right audience.

The wrong game, because their intention was some sort of hardcore mil-sim, which feels really weird to me with all the humor and other elements that all really fit much better with the result: a super fun tactical coop power fantasy.

The right audience, because the evidence is clear: there is no sizeable audience interested in their original vision. But there is a massive audience for what they accidentally made.

Let's say I try to build what I think is going to be an SUV. It sells like crazy and people love it... As a tractor. It becomes one of the most popular farming vehicles in the world over-night.

Do I complain that no one appreciates my vision? Do I try to change the design to be less suitable for what people actually use it for?

Or do I shrug my shoulders, say 'cool, I am apparently really good at making tractors', and proceed to lean into providing the product I am actually able to find a market for?

The amount of toxic pride a small portion of arrowhead has displayed is truly staggering.

Sure, this isn't the original vision. But it's not like people were spitting at them. People LOVED what they made.

Yes, on some level, arrowhead was wrong. But their 'mistake' was more successful than anyone could ever hope for!

So to be as bitter as some devs on the team clearly were, to remain so fixated on their own vision of what the game should be in their eyes...

That's some 5-year old level of emotional maturity.