16
votes
Helldivers 2's crucial 01.001.100 update completely reworks weapons, adds new Galactic War feature, and changes much more in bid to make the game easier
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Published
- Sep 17 2024
- Word count
- 3465 words
I disagree with the assertion that they are "making the game easier." It's an argument that completely ignores the primary reason for these changes: the nerfing and tweaking of weapons and strategems took away the fun. It drastically limited the toolkit at the players disposal and made them play in ways that they weren't interested in playing.
I haven't gotten to play lately, but based on how the game played when I last got the chance, it was in dire need of this course correction. It wasn't fun being constantly overrun with Chargers with no way of dealing with them, nor was it exciting to have bots seige your team with infinite rocket ammo.
These fixes are a welcome step in the right direction. Games like this should make players feel powerful against overwhelming odds. I fully support this direction of development.
There's the saying among game designers that given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of the game, and I think in this case, the devs did that on accident.
Reading the patch notes definitely made me want to try out the game again.
Yeah, the game was really fun for the first couple months but despite the community constantly calling for buffs to the plethora of useless guns, all the devs did was nerf the handful of useful ones.
The last straw for me was when they radically increased the difficulty of duos. My buddy and I loved two-manning missions on difficulty 7, but for some reason the devs decided it's a good idea for duos to be constantly overrun with patrols spawning everywhere you turn.
This patch does seem like a big step in the right direction though, so... I'm tempted to reinstall.
There was a thought about balance changes back when StarCraft 2 was in its original days: games are made more fun when things are buffed up to balance, not when things are nerfed to balance.
I don't know how true it really is (I doubt anyone has done qualitative data tracking and analysis on balance patches across games) but it certainly feels true when we look at how playerbases respond to "nerf-by-default" balancing versus "buff-by-default" approaches.
Ehhhh sort of. The theme of Helldivers is that you’re a replaceable piece of meat in a giant military industrial grinder. Your equipment is shitty because your individual life isn’t that important. The whole war itself is mostly just there to provide a thing to crank an economy into overdrive for. So thematically, you should feel overwhelmed and like your equipment is shitty. It’s very much not meant to be a power fantasy in that way.
But I think partly it was player expectations being at odds with the game design. When you watch high-level players soloing missions one thing you notice is that they barely ever get into firefights and they spend a lot of time running dodging patrols. Once you get past level 7 that ends up being the optimal way for even teams to play. The number of heavy and elite enemies are just way more than your weapons or strategems can handle if you try to actually get in a fight with them.
But players want to get into lots of firefights, even when it doesn’t advance the mission objectives. So that makes it a slog. So they had to shift it a bit.
Helldivers 1 was similarly balanced. You are supposed to chew through all of your reinforcements, and that worked incredibly well for all 7000 fans of the original.
But when part two blew up to half a million players, suddenly most people weren't actually too keen on being exhausted from being run ragged after every game.
I think it took some time for Arrowhead to realise they needed to pivot from their intended game design to the one that the player base wants. Their idea of fun for the game is feeling like you're always this close to losing, but that ends up not being what people want. It just felt like everything became worse, even things that felt good.
This entire patch is a step in the right direction and I do hope they can keep the momentum going. Feeling capable feels much better.
I was just reading through these patch notes and it looks good! I haven't played since launch, but I might ping my friends to jump back in this week if it's changed drastically