The days when Helldivers 2‘s player base was mainly concerned with spooky in-game events and surprise content drops are now—at least temporarily—in the past. These in-universe problems have been replaced by more substantial problems, and the sheer quality and usability of new content is one of them.
To be more specific, Helldivers 2 is still reeling from the recent PlayStation Network account situation, which left the community fragmented and the game unpurchasable in almost 200 countries. Even Arrowhead Games CEO Johan Pilestedt believes that Helldivers 2‘s balancing is now in a spot of bother, saying that he understands why players might feel like “every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
These problems, when put together, don’t paint an awfully pretty picture. In some respects, the situation is fairly dire, albeit one would still be hard-pressed to call it unfixable. Arrowhead will need to respond to the community’s concerns sooner or later, however, and it’s obvious which option would be preferable.
Arrowhead Games may be trying to do too much with Helldivers 2’s content pipeline
Right off the bat, it should be obvious that we’ve got no direct hands-on insight into Arrowhead Games’ production pipeline, and anything stated in the next couple of sections is essentially informed conjecture. However, I cannot shake the feeling that Arrowhead is simply trying to juggle too many balls at the same time.
Premium Warbonds are coming in at a brisk pace: one a month, containing almost half a dozen weapons and gear that often come with all-new features and functionality. In between, Arrowhead has also maintained a steady supply of engaging stealth releases, including mechs, mutated enemies, and new Stratagems, with the end result being a live-service experience where there’s always something new going on. Worst-case scenario, the community “only” gets a Major Order to contend with, with an enemy mutator thrown in for good measure.
Obviously, this whole schtick is a non-trivial development setup. Pushing so much content live so often is absolutely taking a toll on the developers, this way or the other, and the community is all but certain that this is why the subjective quality of the recent content releases hasn’t been stellar.
It’s entirely possible that the studio has prepared dozens of weapons, armor sets, Stratagems, and features in the years preceding Helldivers 2’s release, and it’s only now going through the motions pushing it all live. Even if this really is the case, though, the brisk release pipeline is having an effect on Helldivers 2’s community through a death by a thousand cuts. The latest Polar Patriot Warbond, for example, is overall a disappointment outside of the new incendiary contact grenade and a new sidearm. There’s reason to believe that some of its offerings were balanced for an entirely different combat sandbox.
I’ll concede that this may be the wrong takeaway, depending on how Arrowhead is handling balancing in the backend, but the surface-level conclusion is that the combat sandbox grew too plentiful and varied in too short a time for the balancing team to keep up with everything in an appropriate manner. This, in turn, has resulted in a situation where there’s a massive disconnect between Arrowhead and the Helldivers 2 community when it comes to balance, in particular.
Balancing has become a sore topic in the Helldivers 2 community. In fact, there’s been a non-insignificant amount of friction between vocal players and Arrowhead developers on the game’s Discord. As of right now, it’s not clear what the studio will do next and whether it aims to alleviate the onset of issues in the short term at all.
Pilestedt’s apparent agreement with Helldivers 2 players that the studio has taken things too far is a good sign, at the very least. None of the problems so far are beyond fixing. Slowing down the release of new content and polishing things up would be a major boon to the game at large, from a layperson’s point of view. The vast majority of Helldivers 2’s currently underperforming gear could be tweaked back into relevance relatively easily, even without touching its literal damage output. Pilestedt himself said this is the way to go.
The question we should all be asking is whether this is an option for Arrowhead from the perspective of contractual obligations with Sony, the publisher. It’s entirely possible that Arrowhead has to keep pushing out monthly Premium Warbonds. If that’s the case, balancing will only become more problematic as we receive 3-4 all-new weapons every single month.
Just to put that into perspective, if Helldivers 2 keeps up its currently established content scheduling, this means the game will have received all of the following items in a single year of live-service support:
- 48 new weapons
- 12 new grenades
- 12 new Boosters
It’s just short of mind-boggling, really. Is this level of continued support feasible if Arrowhead wants to keep all of these items fair, fun to use, and relatively balanced among each other?
For what it’s worth, it’s all but obvious that Arrowhead Games knows this can’t go on as it currently stands. Something is going to have to give, and either the community continues to grow more unhappy as new items are released in a subpar state, or the studio takes a step back to slow things down and focus more on quality rather than quantity.
There’s another layer to this problem, too: can a live-service title afford to slow down or postpone its content pipeline? Is the community going to stick around if a Warbond misses its scheduled release date once, twice, or thrice? Or is everyone going to move on to the next flavor of the month?
I do feel that Helldivers 2 has more staying power than that. The game could easily support a more forgiving content release pipeline, with a substantially larger balancing buffer than just a month’s worth of attention. Arrowhead Games certainly has what it takes to keep this game on the straight and narrow, but it’s going to take some rethinking of how to deal with it as it balloons to its true, gargantuan proportions.
