HELLDIVERS™ 2 News

Player sentiment around Helldivers 2 is at an all time low. After an astronomical PC launch for publisher PlayStation, developer Arrowhead has spent the last six months nerfing the popular weapons into the ground. It's hard to get excited about the co-op antics when everything keeps changing, especially when patches make playing feel worse. Players are so fed up that Helldivers 2 is once again getting review bombed, albeit on a much smaller scale than during the PSN fiaco. That said, Arrowhead has a plan.

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Helldivers 2 dev acknowledges huge new update "didn't hit our target"

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead's CCO Johan Pilestedt has popped up on Discord again, this time to tease the effects that the studio believes the next balancing update it has in the works will have. In short, it sounds like a big change is being targeted, with the aim of brining the game a lot closer to the kind of experience many vocal players have suggested they'd prefer.

While there've been plenty of Major Orders to be getting on with while you wait for info, Arrowhead's generally kept its cards pretty close to its chest in terms of specfics regarding updates that'll be coming as part of the ongoing 60-day plan it outlined last month. That said, studio CCO Johan Pilestedt has been getting back to answering player questions in the game's official Discord, with his latest foray into the server having seen him discuss an upcoming patch.

"So, a quick update," the developer wrote just before the weekend, "I have been working closely with the team to look at the game experience (balance mostly). We are confident in the update that we are creating that [it] will see a significant meta shift and bring the game into a state where the playfulness takes the front seat and challenge is secondary. I have had a good time with the experience shift, and it is closer to the original intent of the game and what it was at launch."

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Wake up, a new Helldivers 2 Major Order just arrived, and it's promising the means to create "Orbital Napalm Barrages" if it's successfully completed. What've you got to do to make sure that's the case? Well, nick some plastic from the automatons.

Yep, after everyone got very angry at Arrowhead for some changes that made fire-based weapons a bit less effective in the name of realism - a situation the studio's already attempting to rectify with the subseqent fixes it's deploying, the ability to drop highly flammable gelatinous liquid on Super Earth's foes looks to be incoming.

The fresh MO simply reads: "Liberate the Automaton stockpile of polystyrene on Vernen Wells and decommission the targeted number of Automatons to enable the production of Orbital Napalm Barrages." How many automatons, you ask? Well, a casual 500 million, because big numbers mean nothing to the divers.

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It's been a little bit of time since Helldivers 2 players have heard much from former Arrowhead CEO and still very much chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt, with the developer seemigly having enjoyed some very well-earned time off. Now, however, he's made a bit of a return in rather grand fashion, by answering Discord questions from everyone and their mum.

Naturally, the flak the studio has faced from players following the deployment of the most recent batch of weapon balancing changes - the one Arrowhead announced that much-discussed 60-day plan of changes that it's already acting upon in reponse to - came up, as it has in 99% of dev chats about the game over the last little while.

"It's hard. It's a tricky situation. The criticism is valid, but it causes low morale, and low morale causes slow development speed. Talk about negative spiral," Pilestedt said in response to a player asking how the game's developers are currently feeling. "I think it's important for us to reiterate to the team that criticism happens because people care, " he added in a separate response, "The worst thing would have been if we fucked up and oo one cared."

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Helldivers 2's latest Major Order, at least in theory, is one of those one people really like. Seriously, there are a bunch of things to kill a big number of, and if that's not enough, one of Arrowhead's community managers has just reiterated that having fun on the menu is "an explicit company target" when it comes to the game.

You can't say the studio’s been slacking when it comes to enacting that 60-day plan of changes to help get it outlined following the whole Escalation of Freedom debacle either, having deployed two patches in the last two days. Sure, one was an emergency whipping out of a single fix, but that'll have taken plenty of work.

One of the bugs Arrowhead still has on its hit list is one that's seen Bile Titans not taking head damage properly on occasion, and some players reckon the latest Major Order could well have the side objective of helping the developer gather some more data to help eliminate that issue.

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