Helldivers 2 players have been making their angry voices heard for the past few months, centered around a lack of new content, technical issues, and general balance of the game (too many weapon nerfs in particular). It recently accumulated in ‘Mostly Negative’ recent Steam reviews. Now, Arrowhead Game Studios has posted a Q&A on Reddit to address concerns.
Outside of Steam, you can have a browse through the game’s official Discord server and find thousands of negative reactions to each recent HD2 update announcement. An official response may come as a relief, even if players may be skeptical about all the things it promises right now. Arrowhead says it will deliver “more consistent communication updates” moving forward.
Source: Steam
Source: Discord
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What’s next for Helldivers 2?
The response on Reddit is a pretty lengthy one, so we won’t be going into every detail. To start, here’s a shortlist of all the questions answered in the statement:
- What is the team focusing on right now? What are their current priorities?
- There have been hidden changes to weapons or enemies. Why were they not announced in patch notes?
- Will we get more frequent updates about the game?
- What quality of life upgrades and changes will we see for the Galactic War?
- Will you ever have public beta testing? What is your beta testing process like now?
- Why did you put exosuits in the Exo Experts warbond? Does this mean we won’t get an exosuit for free ever again?
- When will we get new red stratagems and ship modules?
Arrowhead says that, right now, “a major focus for the team is improving meta-progression and the Galactic War”. The studio says it has “significantly expanded” the team for this area of development, as progression is a massively important part of overall player experience in the long term. Players will start to feel these changes this summer.
On the topic of weapon nerfs or hidden balance changes, Arrowhead says it wants its patch notes “to be as clear and complete as possible,” while admitting communication may have been lackluster. Moving forward, the company will aim to be much clearer about changes – at the same time, “deeper conversations” with the playerbase will happen more often.
In the near term, the conversations will be focusing on the biggest issues we’re seeing from players, including:
- Tech and performance improvements
- The vision for game balance moving forward
- Player progression and the broader player experience within the Galactic War
Arrowhead Game Studios
We’ve covered just a small snippet of Arrowhead’s response. If you’re looking for the full statement, be sure to check out the Reddit post above. The studio says it has been “following [players] feedback over the past few days,” so it has clearly been paying close attention to the fallout from the community.
Another recent issue Arrowhead had to address was crashing issues on Linux (and Steam Deck). Perhaps the last big update that was celebrated by fans was towards the end of last year, when the PC file size shrank by a massive 85%.
