HELLDIVERS™ 2 News

Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and Balatro lead Develop Star Awards

You sometimes forget just how many great games have been released during the last 12 months. Helldivers 2 has become one of the best multiplayer experiences in recent years, Baldur's Gate 3 will go down in history as the RPG that transformed the genre, and Balatro, the indie and roguelike game from LocalThunk, is the surprise megahit that just keeps giving. Alan Wake 2, Dave the Diver, Dead Island 2 - all of these and more will be honored at the upcoming Develop:Star Awards, as part of Develop:Brighton, in July. You can find the full nominees list right here.

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Helldivers 2 players rally around an unlikely hero who just wanted to make friends

When they’re not banding together to take on Sony or attempting to reinstate fired community managers, it turns out that Helldivers 2 players just want to make sure everyone feels included. Included in the co-op game’s endless war of attrition to protect Super Earth from bugs, robots, and basic awareness of military propaganda, and included in just having mates. Enter player ‘dremskiy’, whose tragic booting from a private game in which they just wanted to make friends has resulted in so many friend requests that their Steam account won’t accept any more.

Players, especially those going solo or in smaller parties, feeling a bit overrun by the sheer number of bugs or bots swarming them during some missions in Helldivers 2 has been an issue for a little while now. Thankfully, now Arrowhead's got some time on its hands again, it's planning on looking into switching up spawn rates again, with the aim of getting them into a window the community likes.

Prior to the whole hoohah regarding PSN and Steam account linking - which folk are hoping one of the features in yesterday's patch might mark the end of - another patch had tweaked spawn rates. Now, it looks like they're headed back to something like their pre-patch state.

Arrowhead's revealed its plans to revamp how many baddies and patrols the game will fling at you at once via an announcement in Helldivers 2's Discord server by community manager Twinbeard. "As many of you have noticed, something has been off with patrols and spawn rate for some time now," they wrote, "This primarily leads to more enemies rearing their ugly heads than they're supposed to, indirectly to players feeling overrun, kiting, and subsequently less fun gameplay."

In its latest earnings call, Sony chatted about a lot of numbers, as you'd expect. Some of them were PS5 console sales figures, but equally as eye-catching was the number of copies the console maker revealed that Helldivers 2 sold in the weeks following its release. Yup, the shooter has claimed the title of PlayStation’s fastest-selling game ever.

While it's recently hit a speed bump in the form of the massive backlash Sony got when it tried to make linking your PSN and Steam accounts a mandatory requirement for Helldivers 2's PC players - a decision the publisher then walked back - Helldivers has been a roaring success. Even if the real world numbers are dwarfed in pretty funny fashion by some of the ones being chucked around in-game.

As confirmed in the earnings call, the game managed to shift 12 million copies across PC and PS5 in its first 12 weeks, beating God of War Ragnarok's gaudy numbers out to become a new high mark of the company when it comes to sales success immediately following launch.

Playing Helldivers 2 with fewer than four people is torment right now. Swarms of Terminids and Automatons come out of the woodwork, easily overwhelming you. The fewer of you there are the more patrols you'll face, and while Arrowhead originally said this would be most noticeable for solo players, the team is now listening to feedback about how devastating the change can be.

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HELLDIVERS™ 2 News

Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and Balatro lead Develop Star Awards

Helldivers 2 players rally around an unlikely hero who just wanted to make friends

Helldivers 2 devs plan to revamp enemy spawn rates again, as more baddies than intended continue to overwhelm folks

Helldivers 2 sold 12 million copies in 12 weeks, its players have casually killed about 100 times as many bots as that in the past few days

Helldivers 2's overwhelming patrols could get a much-needed nerf