Arrowhead Game Studios has provided an update on its 60-day improvement plan for Helldivers 2 as it seeks to gain back goodwill from the community.
In a statement posted to Steam Thursday, the team highlighted the changes coming to the next update on September 17, which is just a small part of the plan to retool the game. However, the improvements are seeking to tackle a lot of the problems players have brought forth to the developers over the past few months.
The big criticism has been about the concept of “fun” — or rather, what the developers could do to make the game less difficult for difficulty’s sake rather than exciting for players. One of the changes coming in the next update will help to make enemies easier to deal with by decreasing armor on many enemy types, and tweaking balance by reducing rockets fired by the Gunship, for example. This will hopefully “make them feel more rewarding to kill when you use the proper tools to handle them but ensure they still feel formidable.”
In general, armor penetration, enemy armor and health, and anti-tank weapons will be reworked. Arrowhead noted in the statement that the team has already done an “initial balancing pass” over 30 weapons and stratagems so far, including the autocannon, heavy machine gun, and anti-material rifle. They’re also working on flamethrower weapon fixes, which will be welcome considering they were a huge point of contention for the player base.
This 60-day plan was created to address community concerns over certain balance changes that have been implemented since Helldivers 2‘s launch. This all came to a head with August’s Escalation of Freedom update, the game’s first major update, which introduced a bunch of unpopular balance tweaks, such as huge nerfs to incendiary weapons like flamethrowers. People also feel that Arrowhead makes patches that don’t align with players’ experiences.
Game director Mikael Eriksson admitted there were “some things we just didn’t get right — and other more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and game direction.” So the team has been working on better systems for gaining player feedback, and new closed beta tests for new features. In the Steam statement, Arrowhead noted that chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt is working with the design team to analyze player feedback and other data to identify problem points.
