Helldivers 2 promises to focus on fun, but players are skeptical

It was a bad week for Helldivers 2and whether this is due to recent nerfs or just general fatigue, morale seemed to be at an all-time low of the highlights from its February launch. Arrowhead Studios is trying to move forward by promising fans a new approach to how it will update the game going forward after a major backlash over the recent Freedom’s Flame changes.

A pre-Warbond patch on August 6 has generated a lot of goodwill in the Hell divers 2 community when players realized that their old flamethrowers, once glorious Charger fryers, weren’t cutting it anymore. A seemingly simple tweak to flame effects and damage mechanics made it much harder for the weapon to melt through the alien bugs’ tough outer shell. While frustrating in its own right, the nerf ultimately sparked a much larger debate about how to balance a PVE-only game, and why dev teams so often feel like the fun cops.

The studio now says it can’t necessarily roll back last week’s flamethrower changes without breaking other things in the game, but it has heard the feedback and is charting a different course, including a 60-day overhaul of some underlying glitches and performance issues on PC. “In short, we didn’t meet our goal with the last update,” said game director Mikael Eriksson. wrote in a recent Reddit post“There are some things we just didn’t get right – and other, more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to the balance and direction of the game.”

He then listed the studio’s goals for the next two months:

Our goal within the next 60 days:

• Keep re-examining our approach to balance. Our intention is that balance should be fun, not “balanced” for the sake of balance.
• Update the fire damage mechanic to refine the flamethrower as a close range support weapon. (A quick, instant return won’t work, as it would break other things)
• Gameplay overhauled to prevent excessive ragdolling
• Rethink our primary weapon design approach and create a plan to make combat more engaging
• Re-prioritize bug fixes so that bugs that more directly impact gameplay take precedence.
• Improve gaming performance (frame rate is a focus)
• Restore chargers

In addition, from a broader perspective, we will:

• We are investigating the possibility of creating a beta testing environment where users can sign up to improve our testing processes, which we consider a high priority.
• Regularly conduct player surveys to gather more insights and feedback from the community.
• Improve our patch/release notes process by providing more context and reasoning behind changes.
• More blog posts and streams diving deeper into these topics for those interested.

The big lesson here is that Arrowhead is going to prioritize “fun” over “balance” going forward. That’s harder than it sounds, since a big part of the fun of Helldivers 2 feels like you’re just barely getting by in an impossible situation, or even completely breaking down and feeling inspired as a result. While that doesn’t mean some situations can’t feel frustrating or cheap, the solution isn’t simply a matter of making players stronger and leaning more into an OP power fantasy. Perhaps that’s why this isn’t the first time Arrowhead has has struggled with this post-launch tightrope walk.

But after six months in the wildernessit also seems like a smart time for Helldivers 2 to slow the pace of change while developers take stock of where the game is and how it can continue to grow with the community that remains after the initial wave of players has waned. And some of those players aren’t satisfied with Eriksson’s mea culpa and are waiting for more lasting evidence of a new direction for Helldivers 2.

“Nice words, but this is already the second, if not third ‘oops, we messed up and we’re going to talk and change’ community speech,” wrote a player going by the name ExcelsAtMediocrity. “If you guys have a vision and want to keep the core of 5,000 players, that’s fine and your prerogative, but you need to decide which way to go and communicate it clearly and then do it consistently.”