Helldivers II: What Happened?
What didn’t happen?
Helldivers 2 first came to my attention when I saw a game trailer for it on YouTube. I’d forgotten that Helldivers 1 was even in my Steam account. A sequel was nowhere on my radar.
I’m one of the few veterans of the First Galactic War left to tell the tale. Helldivers was a decent and inexpensive top-down shooter. It had the usual things that indicate a good but not terribly high budget. Professional voice actors but the cut scenes were animated flat panels, (CG animation was clearly out of Arrowhead’s price range).
The first game did as well as it should have, maybe a little better. However, the action was repetitive and I eventually returned to civilian life.
I was not expecting a sequel, let alone as elaborate a sequel as the one that launched in February. I bought it, downloaded and tried to launch it.
“Imagine my disappointment upon discovering that Helldivers II was not a non-competitive, third-person co-op shooter but was in fact a battle royale where the objective is to outwait the other players trying to get a precious slot on one of the game servers.
I did get to finish my training mission without getting killed, ever since I tried Drake of the 99 Dragons I regard that as a mark of quality in a game. The music while waiting in the endless que seems appropriate to what I hope the game will be like. Movement in the training mission is quite smooth and I got a cape at the end of it, which I kind of liked.”
Credit where it’s due, the game was playable by the next week.
Here’s what I said at the time.
“It’s not just technical incompetence, (although if you buy anything from Bethesda, damn kid what were you thinking?), no, politics have pushed their way into gaming big time. You can see that the geriatrics who run Vanguard and State Street have finally been convinced that this gaming thing the kids are into has legs after all. Consequently, behaviors will have to be “forced” as Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock put it. The sad part is he clearly thought he was being subtle.
So the grift wagon was hitched to AAA gaming. Want to be told how something completely innocuous is “problematic?” Just call Sweet Baby Inc. They will be happy to tell you that Harley Quinn will need to be beaten with a mid-stick to avoid having purple-haired cancel pigs screaming reeee! at you.
When there is big money to be had, the leeches will get their buddies like Liz Warren to force behaviors from those with money, because the leeches then donate that money to people like Liz Warren.”
After Redfall, Gollum, Starfield, Skull Island, Overwatch 2, Diablo 4, Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League, and of course The Last of Us, PC players were thoroughly sick of the AAA market. When this $40 AA wonder that wasn’t built around constantly wallet-hoovering players dropped, they fell madly in love.
What really made it special was the community. Since it was non-competitive and rewarded teamwork, you didn’t have the motivation that you would have in Overwatch to call your teammate a shithead. We were all having a laugh being Space Nazis. Ask why we only attack in four-man fire teams? And you were likely to be field executed for treason by your teammates. We were all having a blast.
What went wrong?
The PSN:
Unlike Blizzard or Ubisoft, Arrowhead is still being run by guys who love gaming as opposed to being run by MBAs who didn’t care what they managed so long as they got paid too much. The biggest problem they had was that they weren’t remotely prepared for the tectonic shift that Helldivers 2 inflicted on the company.
The truth is that Arrowhead had no way of knowing just how big of a hit they would have on their hands. The game simply wasn’t designed for more than about (a rumored) 50,000 concurrent players. The little Swedish studio that could was hard-pressed to get their newly acquired and enraged players into the game.
The devs were far too tired to see the problems they were going to have later when they asked Sony if they could temporarily turn off the PlayStation network requirement.
Arrowhead publishes through Sony but it was Steam sales that had blown the doors off. Sony had required all PC players to set up a PS account and be logged into it while playing the game. This is not remotely unprecedented, however, PC players really don’t like it and it can frequently trigger a demand for a refund when the player finds out about it. Arrowhead, couldn’t make the login to PlayStation network function with the amount of Steam players they were getting and begged Sony to let them disable this feature. Sony agreed. What is not known is whether or not they explicitly told Arrowhead once you unfuck this build the PS Network gets turned back on. I’m inclined to think they didn’t know it would be enforced because of the PC sales they made to countries that don’t have PlayStation Network service. That was a lot of refunds they had to cough up later.
In Helldivers I, the PlayStation was the primary market. That clearly wasn’t the case anymore. However, Sony is the publisher so they really don’t care about the PC market. And in May they informed Arrowhead that the PS account requirement would be enforced at the end of the month. All Helldivers 2 games being played in countries without PlayStation service would be blocked, meaning those games were going to be bricked.*
Then there was Game Gaurd. Sony’s anti-cheatware. On a PC it runs at Kernal level, granted most all of the anti-cheat software does but it creates a significant security risk. The robot guard dog might turn on you if reprogrammed. Also, it seems to be chatting with its factory a lot.
The Woke:
It was also in the nature of their success. Everybody was loving on Arrowhead because whether they deserved it or not they were being viewed as the anti-woke gaming company. I have no idea if they are or aren’t. Certainly, the community Manager they hired was WOKE AF but I don’t know what their hiring procedures were. Community Manager is the new HR so far as SJWs are concerned, it’s a weak point of any company that is easily entered.
The Players:
Razorfist and I both noticed this one. Gamers have gotten so blackpilled that they refused to accept a small w when Sony partially backed down. They demanded full and complete submission, which of course Sony was never going to do.
The Gameplay:
- Advancement. Advancement was too easy. Less than 100 hours of hard grinding and you could have just about everything maxed out. You had the highest rank. The best gear. The ultimate stratagems. After that, there was no reason to stick around. When the players got bored they left.
- Tactics. Ideally, the players would alter the loadout for the specific mission. However, it mostly came down to having a set of Bug gear and Bot gear. People didn’t change their loadout beyond that. Which meant, again, when the players got bored they left.
- Nerfs. The players are angry over weapons nerfs. It seems out of proportion to outsiders because it is. The real objection is that weapons nerfs and buffs are a hallmark of PVP games like Overwatch, screwing around trying to find game balance, then giving up on that and just shotgunning buffs and nerfs randomly throughout the game to create “metas” in an attempt to keep players engaged. It didn’t work for Overwatch and it won’t work for Helldivers. A better plan would have been; identify the feature a weapon like the Breaker Incendiary has that didn’t look OP in beta, but turned out to be totally broken in the live game. Then grab a Bug like the Hunter and make it immune to that feature, give it a palette swap, and announce that a new mutation has emerged among the Terminids. It works just as well with the Bots.
The Escalation of Freedom event was a failure in every way except one. The players came back. Not all of them to be sure but interest was spiked. The fact that the players were angry was truthfully the mark of a fanbase that’s healthy. The opposite of love isn’t hatred but indifference. I remember how everyone was declaring with total conviction that No Man’s Sky was dead. It wasn’t. Arrowhead is not Blizzard yet, they still love making games.
*Steam doesn’t seem to care that much about those countries using VPNs, I know that players from blacklisted countries are still in the game.
