Helldivers 2, it would seem, is having balance problems. As fellow PC Gamer writer Morgan Park noted last week, the major update Escalation of Freedom, while bringing plenty of cool new features to the game, has also set everything on fire. Again.
Similar to the balance Ides of March, Helldivers 2 has been wrestling constantly with its balance philosophy since the game came out. This is despite the fact that then-CEO (now CCO) Johan Pilestedt wrote in May “it feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.” While promises for bigger and better patches have materialised, the change to number-tweaking strategies and a lower time-to-kill, broadly-speaking, have not.
The studio’s new CEO, Shams Jorjani, has been taking to both Twitter and the game’s Discord to share his two super credits on the situation and—for the most part—has maintained an admirably cool head about it all, remarking that he prefers to hear people impassioned rather than “not giving a sh*t”.
His replies on Discord, however, paint an interesting picture: One of a studio racing to keep up with the demands of that loud and impassioned playerbase. Jorjani writes: “I haven’t spoken to everyone of course—but many of us are disappointed on a few levels … I think a lot of you, fairly point out ‘wtf—we went through this earlier this year. Why are we here again'”.
The problems, he goes on to outline, have a lot to do with scale, the lead on development times, and Arrowhead’s relative inexperience running a live service game in the modern era—experience it is gaining now, presently, the hard way.
“We have long lead times on development. What you see is the result of weeks and months of development work. Some changes take time before they show … not a whole lot of time has passed between now and the June balance round and most people are still on vacation.”
However, he adds, this shouldn’t be taken as simply making excuses and tidying the whole thing away a second time. “We still need to improve a lot in understanding what players want and marry that to the development process. We want every release to be a step in the right direction. Constant improvement. I don’t think we feel this was that. So we need to do better. But it’s also clear that me just talking about it isn’t enough. Actions matter.”
In a later message, he adds that “[being] brutally honest, the company hasn’t released a game in 8 years. Last time I’m sure there were many diverse voices—but nowhere near the same as today.” This, he notes, is “probably the biggest reason for our many missteps”.
He also echoes what Pilestedt noted a while back—that the average time to lay low the enemies of democracy is still too high: “I don’t think it’s JUST a matter of buffing weapons”, he notes, wanting players to have access to the right tools for the job rather than a spread of overpowered bug-blasters, “but we still have an autocannon mech that needs like 20 rounds before it kills a Bile Titan. So we’re not there yet.”
At the very least, these are promising words to come from leadership—but they are, admittedly, words that Helldivers 2 players have heard before. Looking at the game’s subreddit, the response has been particularly harsh: “That’s exactly what Pilestedt said before stepping down from CEO to ‘set things right.’ Yet here we are again,” writes one player, with another asking “has anyone told the CEO of AH that he is the CEO of AH?”
Similarly, a poll on the game’s Discord—with over 68,000 respondents—showed that the majority of players are dissatisfied or feeling neutral about the patch itself, with 26% players responding “it’s good”, 36% players responding “it’s bad”, and 39% responding “I’m neutral / not sure.”
I don’t envy Arrowhead’s job here, and while I think it’s well and good to listen to your community, simply spreading your arms wide to a tidal wave and saying ‘share with me your concerns!’ is only going to end up one way. On the other hand, it’s frustrating even at a distance to see Arrowhead spinning around in the same ditch. Progress is slow for developers, but can feel like it takes an age for players. Fingers crossed that liberty’s flag will fly high once again.