by Arrowhead Game Studios has admitted that Helldivers 2’s latest update “Escalation of Freedom” “is not [its] Target” following significant criticism from the community and details the steps that will be taken to address the core areas of complaint over the next 60 days.
The recent wave of unrest in the Helldivers 2 community followed the release of the major Escalation of Freedom update last week, which made headlines including new mission objectives and enemies. However, it’s some stealthy balance changes that have proved particularly controversial. Nerfs to the popular FLAM-40 flamethrower – which has significantly reduced its effectiveness against Chargers – have drawn considerable ire.
Various senior team members have already acknowledged player feedback—Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani drew parallels to a similarly unpopular balance update released in April (thanks, PC Gamer) and confirmed that the studio was already discussing “what we can do to avoid a situation like this happening again”—but now the developer is ready to lay out a more formalized plan of attack.
In a post shared on Reddit, Helldivers 2 Game Director Mikael Eriksson wrote: “We’ve spent the last week listening to feedback, thinking about the path forward for Helldivers 2, and how we want to evolve the game. In short, we didn’t achieve our goal with the last update.” Eriksson added that the studio sees two types of problems it wants to address: “some things we just didn’t get right” and “other, more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and direction.”
“All of this is up to us and we will own it,” he continued. “As many of you have stressed and we agree, what matters now is actions. Not words.”
To that end, Eriksson shared the studio’s plan for the next 60 days, which will begin with an exploration of its approach to balance. “Our intention is for balance to be fun,” he explained, “not ‘balanced’ for the sake of balance.” Arrowhead will also update the flamethrower’s “fire damage mechanic” to optimize how it works as a melee support weapon, but Eriksson stressed, “A quick, direct return isn’t going to work, as it would break other things.”
And now moving on to more complaints related to last week’s Escalation of Freedom update, Arrowhead will be reworking gameplay to prevent excessive messing around, rethinking its approach to primary weapons and “creating a plan to make combat more exciting,” changing bug fix priorities so those that impact gameplay are addressed first, improving game performance, and reworking Chargers.
The studio also wants to set up an opt-in beta testing environment as a “high priority” to improve its testing processes, and it will regularly release player surveys to gather more insight and feedback. In addition, it wants to improve communication with players – by providing more context for changes in its patch notes and publishing more blog posts and streams to delve deeper into these topics. “We also want to thank you for your patience,” Eriksson added. “We’re grateful that so many of you have provided constructive feedback and suggestions on the latest update.”
Arrowhead’s decision to rethink its approach to balancing follows comments made by Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt in May. “I think we’ve gone too far in some areas,” he told players. “It feels like every time someone finds something funny, the fun is taken away.” Hopefully the studio’s new commitment to balancing will help avoid falling into a similarly unpopular trap for a third time.
