It’s been a bad week for Helldivers 2, and whether because of recent nerfs or just general fatigue, morale seemed to be at a real low point from the highs of launch back in February. Arrowhead Studios is trying to push forward by promising fans a new approach to how it updates the game in the future after a big backlash against the recent Freedom’s Flame changes.
A pre-Warbond patch on August 6 burned through a lot of goodwill in the Helldivers 2 community when players realized their old flamethrowers, once glorious Charger-frying machines, weren’t doing so well 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 armor. Though frustrating on its own, the nerf ended up sparking a much bigger debate over how to balance a PVE-only game and why development teams so often feel like the fun police.
The studio now says that while it can’t necessarily walk back last week’s flamethrower changes without breaking other things in the game, it’s heard the feedback and charting a different course, including a 60-day revamp of some underlying glitches and performance issues on PC. “In short, we didn’t hit our target with the latest update,” game director Mikael Eriksson wrote in a recent Reddit post. “Some things we just didn’t get right – and other more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and game direction.”
He continued by listing the studio’s goals for the next two months:
Our aim within the next 60 days:
- Continue to re-examine our approach to balance. Our intention is that balance should be fun, not “balanced” for the sake of balance.
- Update how the fire damage mechanic works to tweak how the flamethrower serves as a close range support weapon. (A quick straight revert won’t work, as it would break other things)
- Rework gameplay to prevent excessive ragdolling
- Re-think our design approach to primary weapons and create a plan for making combat more engaging
- Re-prioritize bug fixes so that the more immediate gameplay-impacting bugs are prioritized.
- Improve game performance (frame rate is a focus)
- Rework Chargers
Additionally, from a bigger picture perspective we will be:
- Exploring creation of an opt-in beta-test environment to improve our testing processes and we consider this a high-priority.
- Post regular player surveys to gather more insights and feedback from the community.
- Improve our process for patch/release notes – providing more context and reasoning behind changes.
- More blog posts and streams where we expand on these topics for those interested.
The big takeaway here is that Arrowhead is going to prioritize “fun” over “balance” more going forward. That’s harder than it sounds, since a big part of the fun of Helldivers 2 is feeling like you’re just barely scraping by in an impossible situation, or sometimes even getting completely destroyed and feeling inspired by that. 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. Maybe that’s why this isn’t the first time Arrowhead has struggled with this post-launch tightrope walk.
But after six months out in the wild, it also seems like a smart time for Helldivers 2 to slow down the pace of its changes as the devs take stock of where the game is at and how to continue growing it together with the community that remains after the initial boom of players has quieted down a bit. And some of those players aren’t satisfied with Eriksson’s mea culpa and are waiting for more durable proof of a new direction for Helldivers 2.
“Nice words but this is easily the second if not third ‘ooops we made a booboo and we’ll talk and change’ community address,” wrote one player by the name of ExcelsAtMediocrity. “If you guys have a vision and want to keep the core 5000 players that’s fine and your prerogative but you need to decide what direction it’s going and clearly communicate it and then do it consistently.”