Mass Appeal Murderer
Helldivers 2 isn’t the same game I bought at launch. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had the rug pulled from under me to this degree in a video game. In an overcorrection for mass appeal, Arrowhead has completely torn the game’s original vision asunder. From the game’s 60-day balancing rework onward, Helldivers 2 has become a much easier game even on the highest difficulty.
You can find a video version of this article on YouTube!
The problem isn’t just the fact that Helldivers 2 became easier and left many without the game they originally enjoyed. It’s also how many of the game’s mechanics were stripped down or torn out in the process.
No matter how you feel about the Buffdivers update, you objectively engage with less of the game now. I’m going to go over those bits because, to me, it’s important. Not just because I’m enjoying the game less, but because I think that sometimes this sort of mainstream popularity can be a bad thing. Not for Arrowhead, or Sony of course, but for the artistic medium as a whole.
Yeah, I know that statement is going to be controversial. After all, how can having more players be a bad thing? Well, are we really ready to accept that games should simply cater to the lowest common denominator? Should mainstream popularity trump all? Are we ready to say that target audiences and niche fanbases should go extinct in favor of the video game equivalent of fast food?
As long as there is a big enough crowd willing to buy it, could we tell Doom it should be more like Animal Crossing, can we tell Animal Crossing it should be more like Doom?
A line has been crossed here, and I think that sucks. Let’s talk about what went wrong.
Teamwork Is Dreamwork, but the Dream Is Dead
The initial vision for Helldivers 2 was a game where you had to work together to succeed. The working together part was mandatory, especially on higher difficulties. This isn’t up for debate, an Arrowhead developer even made a Reddit comment that their vision was that “you can only clear the highest difficulty with a perfectly coordinated team that all have a specialization that synergizes with others in the group”
In the making of Helldivers 2 video (which has aged like milk mind you), there is one slide titled “Vision”. It states that “The Helldivers is a realistic take on being a tactical squad of grunts in an unforgiving galactic resource war”.
Regardless of what the game is now. Helldivers 2 was not meant to be a power fantasy, and it didn’t start out that way. Even the middling difficulties forced you to work together because if you didn’t you failed the mission.
The game encouraged and facilitated this teamwork in two major ways. The first was the arsenal of weapons and how they functioned, and the second was how the enemies were designed. Most weapons and stratagems had very narrow pathways because the game’s default assumption was that four players would drop in and stick together.
So weapon number 1 would be good against enemy A but bad against Enemy B. However Weapon number 2 was bad against Enemy A and good against Enemy B. However if I took weapon 1 and you took weapon number 2 and we stuck together, we could cover each other’s weak points.
After the buff date, this is no longer true. Each weapon has a greatly expanded pathway of versatility. Any single Helldiver can take a load out to meet any threat. It’s not uncommon to drop into a 4 player squad and watch everyone take off in a separate direction.
Furthermore, buffing the weapons and nerfing the enemies has all but destroyed quite a few of the game’s teamwork mechanics. You used to be able to strip armor off Chargers and Bile Titans, allowing people with other weapons to damage them. It was common for me to blow the leg armor off of a Charger and my friend finished it off with a machine gun. Armor can technically still be stripped, but the heavy enemies generally die to one rocket, so there’s no point.
Some weapons can be reloaded ultra-fast by a friend, but the heavy enemies die so fast to anti-armor weaponry that there is no real use case for it.
You used to have to cover each other. The person carrying a machine gun needed to cover the person carrying a rocket launcher so they could deal with the heavier enemies. Now everyone has something in their pocket to deal with it themselves.
The enemies used to be designed in a way to encourage team play as well. On the bug front Hunters used to be a solo player killer. They acted as a punishment for straying from the squad and were tailormade to rip a lone Helldiver to shreds. The best defense against a Hunter swarm that got close to you was a friend blasting them off of you. Today, they have a cooldown on their pounce and can be easily dealt with by a lone Helldiver.
The Impaler had a similar role, it was a major threat to a lone Helldiver and blocked off running retreats. Now it’s so inaccurate they might as well be removed from the game, I can’t remember the last time I actually got hit by one.
On the bot front if you encountered a Hulk and didn’t have an anti-armor weapon handy, you could flank with your teammates to target their weak spot. Now they die quickly from the front with a wide range of weaponry.
Shield Devastators used to be incredibly accurate with their lasers once they got close enough. Running out in front of one would get you cut down in an instant. This meant they could pin you down behind cover and the best way to get unpinned was for a teammate to take them out while they were focused on you. Now they are inaccurate enough for you to simply step out from your cover and shoot them.
The thing with power fantasies is that they are incompatible with teamwork. You’re playing together sure, but you aren’t working together because you only work together if it’s a requirement to succeed. Working together is fun, but it’s not the path of least resistance, and human brains are wired to take that path.
Skipping Gameplay
By making the players overpowered and the game easier, Helldivers 2 essentially has players skipping entire segments of gameplay or mechanisms. The armor stripping I mentioned before is one such example, but the issue extends far past teamwork.
Weakpoints as a whole are kind of gone. Every enemy has weak points, but they go down so easily with whatever you have in your hands that their existence is kind of rendered moot. Originally taking down a Hulk required a certain level of precision. You had to target its weak points with specific weapons. Now it’s just one rocket, one Thermite or simply spraying its face with a machine gun, or even the Senator, a pistol.
Factory Striders used to be super threatening and taking them down required precision, tactics, and teamwork. Now they just blow up as quickly as they appear. My friend used to charge in to shoot its weak underbelly with an Auto Cannon while the rest of us covered him. An incredibly gutsy and badass tactic, that hasn’t happened once since the overhaul, because it’s not needed.
If you attempt to go for the belly, you’re likely to have the whole walker fall on your head because it’s definitely getting blown up before you have the chance to get under it.
Shrieker Nests used to be these engaging moments of running to the base of the spire while being swarmed by flying bugs, planting the hellbomb, and getting the hell out of there. Now they get taken down halfway across the map.
Having an anti-air load out for gunships or targeting the engines with a few specific support weapons used to make sense. Now they can be taken down by a good chunk of primary weapons. If not, they are so inaccurate that it hardly matters anyway.
Bot Factories used to require you to use a powerful stratagem, or move in and get the right angle on it to throw or shoot a grenade in its doors or vents. Now you can just point and shoot with the majority of explosive support weapons. By that same token, Bot Jammers were another one of those epic moments of storming a fort while being unable to call in your stratagems, you had to deactivate the jammer, set the bomb, and escape.
The thing is, some jammers had a factory attached to it, if the factory was destroyed it took the jammer with it. Once the factory change came, around 50% of jammers could be skipped by blasting the factory at long range. However, that was patched out and jammers no longer had factories attached, Yay!
Oh, wait, the latest War Bond just added a new pistol, the Ultimatum. That can instantly kill the jammer from outside its walls. Oh, it can also bring down Factory Striders in one hit. Did I mention that it’s a pistol?
All of these things are actual gameplay elements that the player base no longer engages with. You are getting less gameplay now than you did at launch. Simply pointing and clicking side objectives away isn’t gameplay, it’s skipping that gameplay.
It’s not just that the game is easier. It’s that you engage with its gameplay systems less, gameplay systems that made Helldivers 2 what it was, rather than another mindless shooter.
The Artistic Cost of Going Viral
So what went wrong? The game sold well, really, really well.
To say that Helldivers 2 sales exceeded Arrowhead’s expectations is a massive understatement. Their optimistic projected player count peaked at 150.000 concurrent players, and that was being hopeful. Instead, it sold 12 million copies in 12 weeks and became Sony’s fastest-selling game.
There are a lot of factors that went into why Helldivers 2 sold so well, including a bit of luck. However, going viral throughout a ton of short-form social media, such as TikTok certainly played a factor. Helldivers 2 is incredibly well suited for short clips showing off its awesome action-movie-like moments. Those clips made people want to play the game and it was a circle that fed into itself with each step the game took on the staircase of fame.
Helldivers 2 was designed for a much smaller, more niche audience, largely fans of the first game. Helldivers 2 was always about those bombastic movie moments, but those moments arose from a journey of carefully crafted gameplay mechanics that emphasized teamwork, tactical thinking, and white-knuckled gameplay. The viral masses, never saw that side of the game, only the cool moments that spawned from them.
These mismanaged expectations are what started the fracture. Fans of Helldivers 1, and anyone who had paid attention to the game’s marketing prior to launch, got the game they wanted. A hardcore tactical team-focused shooter. The mainstream folks who found it through word of mouth and short-form media had very different expectations.
They thought they were getting a mindless power fantasy horde shooter where you overwhelmed everything with massive firepower. And while that was true to an extent, you had to work for it. The game had no problem slapping you to the floor. At least if you tried to punch above your weight by going to the higher end of the 9 (now 10) difficulties, which for some reason I’ll never understand, people insisted on doing.
For a while, Arrowhead did its best to try and keep to Helldivers 2’s original vision. In fact, some Arrowhead employees even got in trouble for being too candid with the community by telling them to “get good.”
However once the game started to lose players, things changed a bit. To anyone who pays attention, the downward trend of players wasn’t all that unexpected, games lose players over time. It only seemed bad because of the obscene amount of players the game initially had. Then there was the whole Sony account-linking fiasco that lost even more players.
With each balancing patch, Arrowhead was accused of overly nerfing the game, even though they objectively buffed more weapons and stratagems than they nerfed in every single patch. Many nerfs were simply fixing unintended behaviors, bugs that had snuck into how certain weapons functioned. The backlash however never relented.
Eventually, there was a 60-day-long balancing overhaul that massively buffed almost the entire Helldivers arsenal, while simultaneously nerfing Super Earths’ enemies. The end result is what the masses wanted, a power fantasy, but it cost fans of the first Helldivers their sequel, as well as everyone who had stuck with and was enjoying the game up to that point. Not even the highest difficulty was left unmolested.
The game’s original vision had been massively altered to the demands of a group that would have never known of the game’s existence, had the original fans not shown it off to them.
Those who disagree with me will point to the player count, that I’m wrong because I’m in the minority. Yeah, I might be.
But if popularity is the sole deciding factor for the quality of a game, that would make Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Madden the objectively best games ever made. Do you agree with that? Probably not, no more than you would agree that McDonald’s is better than every other restaurant, or that Marvel Movies are the best movies ever made.
The problem isn’t even with Sony or Arrowhead, it’s with us, the gaming community. When faced with this situation, we would rather bully developers into changing their vision to something else entirely, rather than step outside of our own comfort zones.
I’ve had a problem with games being dumbed down for mass appeal for a long time. It leads to the entire medium becoming homogenous and safe. But to bully one of the few successful risk-taking games into entering that homogeneity by force? That’s depressingly sad and makes the future of the industry look rather bleak.
It sucks to say, but if Helldivers 2 had only sold its initial projections instead of what it actually sold. I’d still have my favorite game of last year. Instead, I’m constantly hoping to see even a spark of its original soul return. Helldivers 2 has 10 difficulties, and I’m not allowed to have even one of them.
