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Helldivers 2 is in a tough spot right now, following months of reactionary updates that stripped most of the fun away from the game. This led to many players leaving, resulting in the player count dropping to below 10,000 regularly, a far cry from its peak of 458,000 concurrent Steam players.
This all came to a head with the Escalation of Freedom update that thrust Helldivers 2 into Arc 2, instead, it was met with a lot of criticism due to popular weapons such as the Breaker Incendiary Shotgun and Flamethrower being nerfed. Nerfing these weapons wasn’t the best move by Arrowhead as this update brought back over 100,000 concurrent players, but the changes made them swiftly leave and the developers lost a lot of trust within the community.
Arrowhead Game Studios recently announced that the team was working on a 60-day roadmap to rebalance weapons and enemies, as well as fix many of the issues that are plaguing Helldivers 2 such as crashes, performance issues, and memory leaks. Earlier this week, Arrowhead released a blog post detailing what we can expect from the next update that is due to go live on September 17th, which Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani recently claimed that the patch notes are “6-8 pages long.”
The blog post has made many players excited for the future as it seems that Arrowhead is finally going to turn a corner and get back to releasing great updates that will hopefully see old players eventually return to the game, and many are hopeful that Helldivers 2 will reclaim its former glory in the long-run.
U/Mehhehneh took to the Helldivers 2 sub-Reddit to share their excitement for the upcoming patch as well as the planned 60-day roadmap. In the Reddit post, they praise Arrowhead for many of the good things they’ve done, which often goes against the grain of what live-service games are intended to be, saying,
“Despite all of the bugs and balancing woes, the fact that you aren’t locked out of old Warbonds and the ability to get free premium currency pretty consistently shows that Arrowhead has their heart in the right place.”
Live-service games are typically designed around generating as much revenue as possible through microtransactions for cosmetics and other items. This is understandable as many are free-to-play and the games need to make money, but this also does largely trickle into paid games too. Although these practices are in Helldivers 2, it never feels like you’re being pushed to spend any extra money on top of the game’s purchase, and instead, you can earn all of the Super Credits you need in-game without too much effort.
The Reddit user then notes that they “still use the starting armor!” Going to ask “In what other live service game could you say that the starting gear is so competitive? Arrowhead is burning money by not power creeping their Warbonds more.” I must admit, I still use the starter armor too, it serves its purpose well for what I need it to. I have begun experimenting with other combinations more recently as I’ve optimized my load-outs, but the starter armor is still more than fine to use.
They then wrapped up the post by saying “I’m very happy with the Orbital Precision Strike buff, Machine Gun buffs, the Railgun un-nerfs, and the Spear fixes/buffs. I don’t know how the next patch is going to go, I don’t know how many months it will take to fix their spaghetti code or how many flamethrower debacles we’ll have in the future.”
Concluding that “at some point, Helldivers 2 will not just be good, it will be damn great,” with the player signing off by saying that “For $40, I already got my money’s worth and I’m not done yet.”
Only time will tell as to whether Arrowhead lives up to their word, after all, they have overpromised and under-delivered many times over the past few months. But, I am cautiously optimistic and believe they have the capabilities to bring Helldivers 2 to where it needs to be to succeed long-term. For now, all we can do is wait for September 17th when the next update is finally released.