Helldivers 2 Wish List
Hello! I wanted to talk about Helldivers 2 today. I’ve been seeing some videos from OhDough on YouTube and I think he has a lot of good points. People on Reddit and such will say that he’s just negative and whatever but criticism is good. Glazing games, movies, franchises doesn’t do us any good. I mean if something was truly perfect that would be amazing but there’s always something that could be better and when it comes to live service games it can be the difference of the game thriving or dying.
In
his videos, OhDough goes in depth looking at weapon damage, enemy armor,
changes in patches, all kinds of crap that I will never notice and I appreciate
him and other people that do it, in any and all games. One thing he talks about
a lot is fun VS the grunt fantasy. Helldivers 2 is billed as a grunt fantasy
like Starship Troopers in that you are a weak human against impossible odds.
You are not supposed to be a super soldier like Master Chief but in the current
version of the game survivability is hard. You get tapped once you might as
well stim. More than once Arrowhead will make changes to the game as they
release a warbond to incentives us to get (buy) it and/or armor from the Super
Store to utilize the warbond’s armor passives. As an example, when they released
Dust Devils, the armor had a passive that reduced the effects of slow effects
from tremors or
Something OhDough brings up is how Arrowhead sacrifices fun for whatever they decide is realism or fits their grunt fantasy. It’s a video game, a PvE video game at that, nerfing weapons because people like using it to force us to use other weapons and stratagems is rather lame. I typically still will use what I use, sometimes I’ll see people talk about a gun I’ve never really looked at on Reddit and I’ll give it a shot. A lot of them are for certain play styles or frankly people who are insanely good at the game who solo level 10 helldives. The thing that bothers me more is the stratagem weapons. I understand not wanting to make each weapon be able to accomplish the same tasks but it’d be nice if we could switch it up. Again, I know, it’s like a skill issue and stuff but since I only play with my friends we typically will pick the same things to fulfill the needed rolls. Saw a post on Reddit quoting a line from Ghost in the Shell: “It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness.” Essentially saying “be able to take out everything on your own” and I don’t really agree with that. To me that breeds “metas” and either way, if you all build for everything or you each build for certain things, the minute you die you’re screwed. If you’re the one killing heavies and you die your team is screwed. If you die and your teammate spawns you on the other side of the map, your weapon is way over there, the call down for it is on cooldown, you’re fucked. One thing that would help is knowing what’s on the map before you drop. Sometimes on bug planets there’s more spewers than chargers, sometimes it’s the other way around but if I knew its spewer heavy I’d bring a grenade launcher. They blow up real nice and it’s good for bug holes, not so much for chargers, not as good as EATs or the recoilless.
So some things I’d like to see in the future besides knowing what’s on the map are I’d like it if helmets had passives like armor does, even if it’s minor, weapons having more descriptions on their little tab when you select them and I’d like it when you do missions they affect the next missions in the operation. So yeah, a small passive on helmets seems like a good way to mix up passives and add some diversity. Again I pretty much use the same gear no matter the mission or difficulty, I’ll change my armor sometimes if the mission is really hard. Having more information on the weapons would be helpful too. In some of the weapon descriptions they’ll say it has knockback or something but other weapons will HAVE knockback but it doesn’t say that anywhere. The only way is to actually try it out or seek online resources. The thing I’d like most is when completing a mission it changes things in the other missions. I thought there was a video Arin from Game Grumps made for Mega Man X talking about beating certain bosses would change another stages umm, look or effects of the stage. Like if you completed the fire boss first the ice level would change. I don’t know if that even happens in Mega Man and I can’t find the video but that’s the gist (it might be this one, I clicked through and didn't see the part but it might be in there). An example I DO know is in StarCraft Brood War there’s a Terran mission and you have two options; either take out the nuclear silos and in the next mission there will be no ghosts with nukes or you can destroy physic labs so you won’t be dealing with battle cruisers. So, if you do a mission on a bot planet to take out their transports and refueling it would limit or even eliminate bot drops for the rest of the operations. Things like that. Do a mission to destroy bug nurseries or heavy bug nests and the rest of the operation there will be less breaches and/or big guys like bile titans or armored chargers. There is one thing in the game that kind of works like this, to my knowledge. When a planet is under attack it gets marked on the galactic map and has defensive missions to do but the map also has lines connecting the nearby planets to it. If one of those planet lines connects to the defending planet and has arrows going to it, then that is the planet where the aliens are attacking from. From my understanding, this is what I believe the devs themselves have said, if we collectively attack the attacking planet then the defending planet will be saved and going after the attacking planet is easier than doing the defensive missions of the other. But when the game puts a big beacon on the defensive planet that is where people are going to go. Also when you highlight a planet to see what’s going on the box with the information more often then not will cover up the connecting attacking planets route. The community can congregate on Reddit and their Discord to try to coordinate effective strategies for these missions but too few people of the community engage in such things, in my opinion. There needs to be some kind of resource or other icons on the galactic map or the devs just need to straight up say “take THIS planet.” I mean hey, maybe you WANT to play the defensive missions, that’s a thing too and that’s fine but if we are to succeed in this war then we need the right information.
So that’s that. I want fun to be the focus of the game and the updates. I’d like helmets to have passives, more information about the planets, missions and weapons and doing missions in a certain order affecting the rest of the objective. I think knowing what enemies to expect on missions and completing missions to affect changes to the next mission would allow players to experiment more and be okay with grabbing different weapons and stratagems. Essentially if in the previous two missions you eliminate or limit how many heavies are on the map and how many patrols show up then that last mission could just be a relative cake walk and you could bring anything you please. Also, I always go back to WarCraft 3 for this, on each unit they show you what armor and attack type they have. At the time I knew just by looking at the armor type of a unit what was good against it, Helldivers 2 could use something similar. Maybe something on the ship itself where you can review enemy types and see what armor they have and what works against them; light penetration, medium pen, ect. What would you like to see added in the future? What are your favorite weapons and stratagems to use? If the mission allows it I like using as much fire as possible. I typically prefer air strikes to orbitals, I find it fits my idiom better. Well that’s all for now, I’ll be back sometime, until then, bye-bye.
This is a video about dark patterns in video games, I wanted it to be in here somewhere but didn't know where to put it so, here: video. (Maybe this would fit better in my last post about Horizon Steel Frontiers)
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