Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
It has been a tough few months for Arrowhead Game Studios, with many Helldivers 2 players leaving the game following many bad decisions by the developers, largely relating to weapon balancing coupled with broken mechanics and features. While Arrowhead are committed to improving the game, many are skeptical which has led to Helldivers 2 regularly dropping to below 10,000 concurrent players.
U/Wolfsquad11 took to the Helldivers 2 sub-Reddit to post a video that shows Automaton lasers being slowed down by bushes. This highlights the unusual mechanics found in the game, likely caused by the engine and “technical debt” that makes it incredibly difficult to work with.
This led the Arrowhead Game Studios CCO, and former CEO, Johan Pilestedt to jump into the discussion and share his thoughts on the mechanics and development of Helldivers 2 by saying “Not simulating projectiles accurately sucks in games. Gun mechanics should strive to be as verisimilar as possible in a shooter, same as cars in racing games.”
U/Heck_Flopper replied to Pilestedt to criticize Arrowhead’s determination to base its mechanics on being realistic, while often making little sense from a gameplay standpoint.
“They’re going so hard on realism when the realism makes zero sense.,” they said. “Nothing should ever be added or changed because of realism, it should be done because it makes sense from a gameplay perspective. This one foot in one foot out mentality is only confusing to the players and leads to frustrating design changes that were added just cause it was realistic for it to work that way.”
Pilestedt then admitted that the team has “missed the mark” when it comes to balancing, focusing too much on “balance for competitive play,” which doesn’t make much sense for a PVE game.
He went on to reply that “The appearance of real is what we strive for, but it is not real – when it works the game world behaves in such a way that there is predictability of outcomes but complex interaction of systems. This variability should give depth and nuance to the experience, creating surprising and exciting moments.”
“The experience should be believable using 80s/90s action movie logic, with a stark contrast between the human abilities of the Helldivers versus the supernatural abilities of the foes. We have missed the mark on many of these points over the last couple of updates, especially the balance adjustments that have been too much in the camp of “balance for competitive play.”
Sometimes you just need to say what you really feel, and it seems that U/Puffz0r took this opportunity to lay into Arrowhead for its failures over the past six months by saying,
“Your development team has received the same feedback over and over for the past 6 months, and yet you continue to persist in some mistaken belief that your idealism is what got you your success in the first place. Yes, you made a good game – at launch – and you struck the jackpot by having a confluence of factors launch your game into the stratosphere via social media virality.”
They then warned Arrowhead not to let their success “become an ego stroke,” going on to say that “you got lucky, the kind of luck that fails to find hundreds of other developers. Don’t throw it away.”
“I love this game but it breaks my heart when you continue to misidentify the issues with the game. Your number one issue is the massive amount of technical debt that you accrued over the years that is making it impossible to roll out changes without completely breaking systems in your game. And the fact that you roll out these changes without thorough testing. These issues have been brought up time and again, people lose their patience very quickly.”
Puffz0r then concluded their reply by pointing out that “99% of other games would already be completely dead at this point if other developers responded in the way your team has, and it’s a testament to how much goodwill your launch generated that tens of thousands of people still stick around. But if you continue down this path it’s not going to last.”
Pilestedt then admitted that the team is burnt out from a long development cycle and that the studio needs to focus on improving its systems, concluding the conversation by saying “The team being tired from a long development has been challenging. The systematic approach to game design means that it takes longer for us to onboard new engineers – with over 200 systems that all need to interact and has a lot of details per system – and mistakes happen as some who wrote the original systems are no longer with the studio, meaning nuances can bite us in the behind.”
“We are improving this, but as you can see – this combined with the demands on the team from the appreciation that the game has found as well as our ambition level is straining us. We need to do better with our QA processes. The key issue that I see is the delta from launch where the game was about having a fun, chaotic, challenging emergent experience with like-minded has been eroded through a shift in focus to challenge and competitiveness without considering the more playful experience.”
Despite the goodwill from the community, it is beginning to wear thin, with Helldivers 2 failing to crack 10,000 concurrent players as I type this, with the player count currently at 9,370. This is a far cry from the over 458,000 that it peaked at on Steam, with it being hundreds of thousands higher when the PS5 community is taken into account. Despite many players leaving, Helldivers 2 continues to receive a lot of praise and it is clear that players want to return to the game if they are given a reason to. Hopefully, Arrowhead Game Studios can turn it around because it would be a shame to see the game fall further than it already has.
The Helldivers 2 developers seem committed to fixing the game, with a 60-day roadmap that aims to rectify many of the issues caused by the Escalation of Freedom update and address long-standing issues. Despite it now being two weeks since the announcement, the team hasn’t begun to work on the roadmap, so it is unclear when the first update will go live.