Helldivers 2 CEO On Weapon and Game Balance!

ladies and gentlemen hello and welcome to the channel we've got an impromptu Q&A from the CEO in which he breaks down loads of details things like melee weapons things like stats on helmets what about capes what about balance loads of topics are covered here so I'm going to break all of this down it's going to be a long one so I grab a drink let's just get stuck into this cuz there's tons of information but before we begin with that take a look at this because the reaction to the latest war bond has been well it it's been quite negative to be honest and it is Justified because when you start looking at the actual relative power levels of the weapons in the war bond compared to what we've already got well they're quite lacking so check this out these are the comments on my video from earlier on in the day they're amazing just look at this devs being efficient and saving time by releasing weapons pre- nerfed hey the new weapons came pre- nerfed for our convenience that was considerate of them dude the tenderizer is literally El liberated with 10 round smaller magazine what a joke and I was like hang on is it well yeah it is look at this image it compares the tenderized to Ator now look at the stats it the this is horrific you got to remember the tenderizer is meant to be a premium weapon in the war bond it's made it's meant to make you want to spend money on the ability to unlock these weapons and if it feels crap then why would you do that and in fact in this war bond I honestly stand by what I said in the earlier video where I think the SMG is pretty good mainly because of its concussive um stats where it can basically well it concuss his enemies it can stun like enemies things like stalkers when they try and get you you can just drill them with it it's really really good it's super strong for that um but the the tenderize is terrible the impact grenade is decent I do like that I'm having some fun playing with that specifically against the bugs but then the plasma weapon holy hell that thing is horrid it is actually garbage teer that is so yeah anyway how should they be balancing the weapons well I'll say this to you guys the tenderizer I was hoping it would be a literal carbon copy of the weapon in Starship Troopers I wanted to see like a massive cross style muzzle flash coming out the weapon almost like I don't know how to explain this without making sound effects but I wanted it to be like like really powerful I wanted it to be like a super powerful AR that was doing a ton of damage but it's actually not and in fact it's basically the same as the Liberator which is insane cuz that's the weapon everyone gets at the start of the game now there's a lot of stuff going on here weapons get buffed weapons get nerfed but surely the weapons in the war bond should actually be giving you a power fantasy so you want to use them and therefore want to unlock them and therefore want to get the war bond and the question is are they actually doing that right now well it looks like they're probably not right then let move on to what the CEO has been saying now there's a couple of tweets here but mainly this is from Discord so he went on an absolute Avalanche an absolute storm and was answering tons of questions it would be nice to get an official Q&A maybe they could host something on Reddit like an AMA that would be pretty cool anyway let's break all of this down and to begin with let's start with balance because it is a massively hot issue in the community the Alexis guy bringer of balance Dev will ruin this game so fast and the CEO responds to this says Hey Dark Moon I've seen you post similar things several times now I prefer not to speak about employees on an individual basis so I won't and that's completely fine you know a boss of a company should not be going around [ __ ] talking individual employees that's the way you end up with no employees and it's the way you end up with no morale and it it's the way you end up with your company failing so that would be insane if that ever happened so obviously that's what he's going to do anyway he says this but I can say that we can do a better job at providing more exciting updates and balanced changes this is the thing this is a running theme you will see through this this game or at least from the responses here from the CEO this game game is about an insane power fantasy of being a craz you know sci-fi Trooper on the front lines mowing down tons of enemies right that's what it is so you want weapons that feel awesome when you do that and I think we've all got that when we first picked up the game but now when we starting to see these newer weapons get added to the game they're not actually Translating that to the player uh and I think they need to work more on that and obviously the CEO agrees with that then over on Twitter he gets ask this question hell divers has just become unfun for me and a lot of my friends I've put insane hours rank 80 I don't know what to say these past months of balance changes have made the game basically unplayable for me sad to see balance changes come over the priority of fun and Johan responds with hey yeah I think we've gone too far in some areas we'll talk to the team about the approach to balance it feels like every time someone finds something fun the fun is removed now this could be in reference to the Eruptor which was removed it was the balance there basically said it was an exploit using it to detonate underneath um the weak spot of a charger and cause the trapnel to go into the you know the ass of it and destroy it now that was fun there are other examples I'm sure that we could come up with that were fun and that have been you know the Fun's been taken away the power has been removed you know and and that's not great like I said this game is straight up about a power fantasy of just mowing down hordes of enemies so the weapons do need to build fun they cannot balance this game like it's a PVP game it isn't it's a PVE game it almost doesn't matter in some respects how powerful or how weak weapons are well I guess it doesn't matter how weak they are but you're not using them against your team you're using them against the enemy so I don't know it's it's a difficult one but it is interesting to see what the CEO thinks here so what about balance philosophy would you proceed with the balancing changes from a bottom up perspective making the underpowered and underused guns good again before nerfing the ones that are currently good that's something I think most players would appreciate the top down nerfing has been quite diversive hey I agree with this sentiment I am to talk to the team next week about your guys feedback on balancing so this is interesting isn't it because I think what is going on is when you take power away from a weapon it feels horrible now some weapons will be op the rail gun was op to begin with and then it got well railed in rained in I guess it didn't get railed in um so yeah that didn't feel great for the people using the rail gun but you got to remember back in those days everyone was running in the rail gun cuz you just kind of had to cuz you didn't really have any other options or at least we hadn't worked out how to use the other weapons but it is uh a sentiment that I can get behind you cannot put a weapon into the game leave it for an extended period of time and then make changes to it that make it feel crap to use because they've done this repeatedly with weapons and it doesn't feel great so if you flip that on its head weapons come into the game and then you looking to buff them you could argue that's what's gone on with the uh current war bond and it's obviously a lot of the meme comments about the weapons coming pre-fed would make sense in that way cuz that now they could go you know what we're going to buff the the tenderizer and suddenly it's going to be awesome you know and we're going to buff the plaz weapon and all of that like so they can do that there is a way out of this and maybe that's what they were going for with this um war bond but it's still a little bit strange isn't it but I do agree with this sentiment and the CEO agrees with it as well do you guys agree let me know in the comments below cuz I know balance is a massive issue uh for for everybody basically so what about design Philosophy for the game in general I established this design philosophy when making hell divers 1 and Hell divers 2 that no particular enemy should be challenging when conditions are perfect and you have the right tools but the disruption element of many foes at the same time will lead to problems so charger no problem charger charging while a stalker stuck upon you big problem and yeah you do get that like this is the sense of getting overwhelmed this is the thing you'll see hell di plays talk about controlling the flow uh and it's basically staying on top of what's going on you know whether that's making sure you're thinning out the bile Titans making sure you're getting rid of the charges making sure you're destroying the stalker Nest fairly quickly and things like that also like when you come across a patrol and you need to engage it killing it really fast so it doesn't spawn reinforcements when you're trying to take over a point uh whether it's for an objective or to just pick up some loot you go in effectively and efficiently kill everything before ads can spawn uh these are just all sort of things that you need to do if you if you want to play hell divers at the harder difficulties but yeah I think this is totally fine design philosophy cuz a charger is very easy to kill when you've got an eat rocket and it's running straight at you but if you're getting knocked about by everything else or you're getting attacked or pushed by a load of other mobs or you having to run in some sort of crazy zigzag pattern and you're diving all over the floor then a charge comes in yeah there's a problem um so I think this is fine yeah this is just what hell Dives is I think this is what makes the game great hi I don't think you remembered but before the game launched I asked you if the PS5 version of the game will have improvements like vrr 40 FPS mode on quality mode Etc and and you said there were looking into it but you said no promises so I guess it's scrap hey man great accountability with the success of the game and with everything that's happened a lot of our plans have been put on the back foot we are still always pursuing technical variability to provide the best experiences but so much is added on our to-do pile that we have to rep prioritize constantly eventually I hope we're able to get there now this is fine like this like these these responses are great you know I've said this in a couple of videos in the past but it feels very much like a Jeff Kaplan approach this does so if anybody followed OverWatch back in the early days it was very much like this where you had the Figure Head of the game basically talking to you as if he was talking to a member of Staff about the game and it feels great it's not a PR response it's not some stupid statement it's not some highly polished video or whatever where they're just saying things that they know you know possibly won't cause any offense possibly won't cause any you know confusion I don't know it's just straight up answer the question like look we're getting slammed the game's been massive we have to keep re and stuff yeah we will get round to it at some point can't tell you when but yeah and it's just good stuff it is super refreshing to see this again cuz it's been so long since we've had or since I've actually come across anything like this is your team getting the feeling that balance patches are forcing people into a tighter meta instead of opening up loadouts the team tries to balance for varied loadouts but we don't always succeed in getting there now this is true but I will say this I do think there is quite a load out diversity at the moment I never go into a game and see the whole team with all the same gear you never see that yeah you might see things like the eagle air strike fairly often I think I pretty much take that every game 500 kgr bomb as well you'll see that a lot you might see um things like the quazar although I think that's dropped down a bit the eat is probably more popular than the quaz are now so yeah there are things which you will see more often I mean obviously the flameer we're seeing a lot of the bugs and it's great against Chargers basically great against any bug apart from a biot Titan um you can do some stuff to it with biot Titans but I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend that unless the B Tian gets stuck and then you can sit there just damaging it but even then it takes a hell of a long time to kill him but whatever so yeah I think they're actually nailing this at the moment cuz I think it's almost like in some other games we might talk about map meta um rather than just picking the same characters or the same loadouts for every single level and I think we've kind of got that uh with hell divers too we've got load outs against bugs we've got load against automatons and then we've got Mission specific loadouts you might see more of the mechs on the eradication missions for example so I think they're actually nailing this and uh or you might even see like cluster bombs on the egg destroy missions and stuff like that so I think this is actually okay at the moment I don't feel like there is just a meta that everyone is being forced to play the team is doing what they can with the best of intentions we all want the game to be the best it can we don't just want to do what is expected we want to go beyond that however I feel we've been falling short so this is in response to a comment just asking about the general state of the game and to be honest yeah like you're always going to strive for something more even if you were like the greatest thing ever made ever you would still want to try and push beyond that boundary so it's good news to see this is the way the CEO thinks it isn't just oh yeah we we've made a game it's sold well that's it we've had enough of this no it's like no we actually want to push the boundary we want to keep developing the game and this is one of the things that interest me with this like imagine where it will be in a couple of years time like where will this game be next year who knows but it'll probably be a lot better A lot more complex have a lot more Mission types have a lot more maybe enemies have a lot more weapons that are worth buying you know and all of that stuff so yeah good stuff so what about medals and the sample limit now I actually would like this to be increased however it's not going to be increased and Johan explains why we don't want to up the limits because the new systems will inevitably use them and if you have too much of a head start with new progression it will take the out of it if you see what I mean so yeah I mean think of it this way I go into this new war bond today I've got 250 medals I can unlock basically everything I want from the first and second tiers but then the third tier what I need to play I need to start playing missions I need to earn another like 100 medals whatever it is to buy well I think it's more than that actually probably like another 250 medals to unlock everything on that page that maybe I wanted um including the armor and stuff like that so yeah this is a it is an artificial barrier it is a barrier to say like okay you can't just have everything straight away you can't save up tons of medals and then cash them in but what I would say is maybe there could be some sort of a way of using excess medals and maybe using excess requisition to potentially buy samples or or do something with samples or there some sort of currency conversion system they've got so we can move between them that might be quite nice cuz it does feel sometimes like when you're capped on requisition when you capped on medals you're just sort of like well what am I actually doing with this resource I'm not doing anything anything it's almost pointless all I care about at the moment is samples togr the ship so can't I push them across but yeah it looks like at the moment no this is a progression system in the game and it won't be changing is there any news about the 177 countries Dlisted issue and he says sorry no I'm speaking to our partners at PlayStation and Val and pushing for it to be undone getting the account linking took a herculan herculan effort but I won't rest in my desire to have it available every so still not back at the moment but they are still pushing to get it Reed to those countries where it was Dlisted on Steam I'd imagine this will happen fairly soon I W I'll be surprised if we go through next week and it still hasn't been rectified although I must give a shout out to the players in Vietnam because after this whole disaster then Vietnam went and banned steam so steam's not even available in the country so a lot of those players well they can't even get back on the game which is kind of sad it's all about new strategems more gas abilities needed ASAP for well need the tox 13 which I think is from Hell divers one and he says agreed it's on the list of strategems we have to do at some point so yeah more toxic gas strategems are coming and more strategems from Hell divers 1 which actually could be some like if you go and check out the wiki for hell divers one look at all the strategems look at the weapons and stuff you're probably going to get those added to Hell divers too at some point so what about the spear lock on cuz it's still not fixed and he gets asked about this you should hear my potty mouth every time the spear doesn't lock on in play sessions it's been the bane of the dev team for such a long time now so yeah still isn't working still being worked on still will be fixed at sometime still is a really annoying weapon to use when it works it's incredible when it doesn't work it's super frustrating which is most of the time this is a good question so what about the policy of mods because you can mod this game now there are some crazy videos floating around there on the internet where people have changed charges to Thomas the Tank Engine and so you got Thomas the Tank Engine mowing you down which is I mean it's destroying my childhood because I used to watch that when I was a kid anyway um he gets asked about this and the response is actually pretty cool so he says the official terms of service is don't do it if you violate terms of service this is standard since the game has so many meta components that might get screwed up and it's hard to differentiate between a client side mod in a game that uses peer-to-peer so cheat systems might accidentally ban you The Unofficial Arrowhead would never take action against modders that don't cause any harm I think saying that um but yeah so basically what he's saying is don't mod the game and play it multiplayer because you might get picked up by the well the cheat but the antiche also you might just get picked up by the antiche anyway it is quite aggressive the antiche in this game so it might get you even if you're just messing around locally and your you know you've got your Social setor private it might still just ban you off the game which wouldn't be great um but yeah Arrowhead want mods but mods are a bit of a difficult thing to do what about armor shaders is there still any discussion on Armor shaders or at least matching the helmet color to the rest of the armor yes but I can't talk about it much yet okay or I can't talk too much about it yet so I think this was on the cards it was odds on when you look at Armor I think the ability to just change the color of of armor would be fantastic cuz you imagine like some sick black armor or like some awesome red armor or whatever you could take an armor set which is you know maybe an older armor set and give it a new well new le to life with a fresh paint job but also you can make your stuff actually look like it belongs together as well and there are some armor where you know the various bits and pieces don't quite go together that well and it would be nice to kind of patch that up with the colors um but this is great and I think this could open the door for more customization down the line and I'd be all for that I don't think anyone would be against this I think this would be a good change and then gets asked about melee weapons now he says M weapons what a treat I think I saw concepts of a ceremonial saber and Bayonet somewhere I don't don't know if they are in the plans though now the devs have actually spoken about melee weapons before and I think it was Alexis the balance Dev or it may have been a different Dev um but they were saying like that literally melee weapons wouldn't work in this game they'd have to completely change the balance of the game the way the enemies work just they're designed to be shot at they're not designed to run up to and smash them in the face now obviously we all want to live that assault Marine fantasy and jump in with our jump packs and just absolutely smash the crap out of enemies with chain swords now that's not going to happen apparently not anytime soon but what could happen is ceremonial weapons or maybe even a bayonet I think a bayonet would be pretty cool if you got like a bayonet attached to a weapon instead of using your the but of the rifle to like smash them you bayonet the enemy I think that' be cool you could just keep the damage the same it would just give you again that power fantasy of like oh I'm baying the enemies it's like my last stand kind of thing a ceremonial sword like a saber or something whipping that out and then slashing wildly would be crazy obviously it would be it would be completely ineffective against almost every enemy apart from the smallest enemies but this would be cool and again this would add to the customization element of the game so I'd be all for this think it would be an awesome change he then gets asked about capes and helmets and adding traits to them not to capes but I know there's a combo on helmet originally each helmet was going to have a unique heads up display so Medics would be able to see Health Recon would get enemy outlines Etc but we fortunately had to cut it due well to having to ship the game now this is awesome so this is insight into the the I guess the initial or the original development plan for the game so they wanted helmets to have stats but not stats in the way of oh you just got armor resistance or explosion resistance or you've got whatever whatever they actually do something functional maybe that's night vision right maybe that's like he says Medics being able to see Health maybe it's like Recon being able to see like um you know through the wall x-ray vision seeing the outline of enemies that would be awesome and if this is something they were thinking about doing there is a chance that they're still working on this and this could be added to the game in the future cuz if they went and started added stats and and this kind of special effects and special hoods I should say to helmets it would be awesome now the issue would be would they go back and retroactively add this to all of the other helmets would that be difficult to do I don't know maybe not if you've just got a helmet type you know like this is a Recon helmet this is a medic helmet this is a heavy helmet this is a whatever helmet yeah then maybe they could just apply the same effect that would be really cool but I think this would be massive also as well there'll be no steps on the capes and I I think I'm fine with that cuz the Cape is the main element of your your I I guess visual customization it's what you see most of when you're playing the game your cape so yeah I'm completely fine with that just having no stats but the helmet yeah I definitely think that should and this also opens the conversation like what about gauntlets what about boots you know you could go crazy if they eventually started breaking up armor in that in that kind of way also as well there's weapon modific I would like to see more information on that where are they going to go there were leaks about weapon mods but the thing is with leaks sometimes the leaks are looking at older builds of the game or just files that have been in the game for a long long time may have been worked on may have been dropped there was a modification system floating around for a while and where you could change all elements of the weapons now if that's true that' be fantastic cuz again you can keep customizing your weapon for whatever need you want it but then maybe that would make adding new weapons to the game kind of pointless cuz if you got your perfect weapon why would you care about new weapons it's an interesting one isn't it all right ladies and gentlemen so yeah the CEO has been active now I find this kind of interesting because um we had the whole controversy with spits the community manager being let go from Arrowhead and Arrowhead not really having um much of a community sort of I don't know facing or forward facing Presence at the moment there obviously twin beard and a bunch of other community managers out there that have been doing this um but I think it's quite interesting that the CEO stepped in and just started answering questions and like I said I do get the the feeling of like Jeff K of old where he doesn't have to ask for permission before he answers questions he just he just answers the questions he just tells you how it is and it is so refreshing to see that all right guys I'm going to leave this video at that it's been a pretty long one I thought it was going to be longer than whatever this turned out to be maybe this is like 25 minutes 30 minutes long or whatever but this again peels back the curtain Let's us see what the development Studio doing let's just see how the CEO is thinking about the game but a lot of stuff has been covered here so let me know what you think about all of this in the comments below and I've been stos and if you enjoyed the video do like the video and subscribe to the channel and yeah leave a comment below it all helps the elgo and yeah I'll catch you guys on the next one see you soon

Channel: Stylosa

Views: 64,567

Keywords: Stylosa, HELLDIVERS 2, helldivers, helldivers 2 gameplay, helldivers 2 stratagems, helldivers 2 crossplay, helldivers 2 coop, helldivers 2 playstation 5, helldivers 2 ps5, helldivers 2 trailer, helldivers 2 news, helldivers 2 pc, helldivers 2 updates, helldivers 2 game, ign, warhammer, pc games, helldivers gameplay, helldivers 2 review, helldivers 2 gameplay trailer, helldivers 2 preview, helldivers 2 tactics, helldivers 2 details, ps5, best stratagems helldivers 2

Id: GLzC5EpgIAY

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024