The Sad State of Helldivers 2

on February 8th the gaming industry was shook to its core when the sequel to A beloved Indie title was released to the public Hells 2 had been long anticipated by its small but loyal fan base as evident by its strong launch boasting nearly 10 times the players its predecessor ever had at its peak with over 64,000 players on Steam alone you'd have to imagine that the game's developers Arrowhead Studios were ecstatic over the launch but what would occur over the following days would be an explosion in players that Arrowhead could only dream of I what no oh my gosh no no no z Oh called democ oh my [ __ ] oh no with the massive influx of new hell divers eager to spread manag democracy across the Galaxy the game hit but a minor Road bump in its rise to fame the servers literally couldn't handle all the new players of course this didn't last long the servers were quickly expanded and shortly after on February 24th hell d 2 would hit its all-time high with over 750,000 concurrent players according to PlayStation but let's be honest you don't need me to tell you how insane this game launch was because you were probably there it was blown up on a level that hadn't been seen in the gaming world it was unheard of literally everybody was playing and if they weren't they surely heard about it on social media alongside the game's blow up the community blew up as well what was once a small but passionate community that played the original hell divers in 2015 quickly became a massive group of players that United under one goal to spread democracy and this wasn't a joke it was everywhere in comment sections on forums even in real life people were ecstatic over this new game and the fact that it was PVE meant that largely players didn't have to argue with one another it was a rare game that had everybody on the same side fighting for the same cause and people were very passionate over this cause it was an incredibly special thing to be a part of everybody was basically method acting as hell divers people were calling out of work to have more time on the front lines hey I I can't make it in today I'm really not feeling well they were calling anyone traders that spoke negatively about superar and even people who didn't own the game were in on in Xbox players were calling themselves civilians and waiting for their time to be deployed and gamer girlfriends were making sure their boyfriends had enough time to spread democracy seriously when I say it was special I mean it I have never seen such a large Gaming Community come together like this in this fashion but of course with a community this massive you'd expect there to be some bad apples really though they were few and far between this community was one of the best I'd ever been in everyone you met in game was friendly and always willing to help out a fellow player and people on social media everywhere were making memes and creating strategies to complete major orders but this insane surge couldn't last it's extremely rare that any game holds their initial player count weeks after release so it shouldn't be surprised that hell d 2 has not quite reached those absurd concurrent player Heights again while we don't have conclusive player numbers from PlayStation steam charts can tell us a lot about the player count the game has been steadily losing players every month since release of course this hasn't been a long time but the pattern is starting to show in March it lost about 20% of its average players around 57,000 this was likely normal at this time the game was still incredibly popular in the social Zeitgeist and as mentioned pretty much every game suffers a drop off in players in the following weeks and months after release but the numbers get worse in April it saw another 34% of players leave and so far through May it's averaged 108,000 concurrent players compared to the 274,000 average players that February boasted the game has lost 60% of its average players in just around 3 months while that doesn't look great again it can be explained away that games actually suffer from this all the time power world which released a month before hell divers actually had nearly double held diers players but is now sitting at 32,000 average players a loss of nearly 97% in players for power world I'm not going to sit here and compare the steam charts of games but that should give you a good idea of why the numbers look like this but that's not the whole story and really the player count is just a very small portion of what this video is about I'm more focused on what the hell is going on in the community numbers aside players are getting more and more fed up with the game itself anywhere you look whether it be Discord Tik Tok YouTube Reddit the game has quickly gone from a massive community of Hell divers uned under one cause to a Fractured bunch of players debating about the balancing of Hell divers the glitches that continue to plague the game the content the mistrust in Sony just generally complaining about anything and everything and honestly these players are valid in most of their complaints but of course where there are opinions on the internet there are arguments and there are many I don't recommend you venture into the hell divers Discord General chat but if you dare you are guaranteed to see people talking about one of three things the balancing of the game disconnects and bugs or how bad the new content is where just a few months ago this same chat was filled with people meing about the game talking about the major order and posting their Clips but now that is few in far between as much as I don't recommend going into the general Discord chat I can also not recommend anybody ever go on Reddit for any reason at all but if you wanted to see for yourself that is the perfect place to gauge where the community stands on the game at this point and for as much arguing I said goes on in here there is actually a lot of shared sentiment among players that the game is feeling stale and I'm inclined to agree I think for many reasons the game just doesn't hit the same which sucks to say I am finding myself playing this game less and less every day and don't get me wrong I still love it this video isn't being made to bash on your favorite game trust me it's one of my favorite games too but the game really peaked for me back in the first month of release and it just hasn't hit those Heights again and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way look anywhere you want and people will be saying the same things and player numbers will continue to fall off but why is this well the obvious answer is that the honeymoon phase is over it's no longer the hot new game on the market and this could easily explain the percentage of lost players so yeah while I think the end of the honeymoon phase is a massive cause in all of this I also know there's something else going on here because if it was just the honeymoon phase ending those players would be gone and the community would be more or less the same but it's clearly not people are fed up and they want the game to be better hell divers has only been out for a short while but I think we're in a pivotal moment in this community it has gone from being united under superar and posting memes and clips to now reminiscent of PVP game communities where players are constantly fighting and complaining so what's truly going on here why do so many players take issue with the current state of the game and why is it feeling stale well unfortunately it's a lot of things my my name is easy today is May 15th 2024 and this is the state of Hell divers [Music] 2 on an early morning on March 6th hell divers awoke to the first large patch of this game's so far short life fan favorite items like the breaker rail gun and energy backpack had been nerfed actually it is kind of an understatement to say these were just fan favorite items these three items made up a majority of highle player loadouts if breaker allowed you to hoard clear like there was no tomorrow the rail gun could take out any medium and large enemies and the energy Shield backpack was the best backpack in the game keep in mind this is before they changed how enemy patrols and spawns worked and if you don't remember basically any mission that was difficulty 7 or above was just an endless barrage of bile Titans and Chargers there was a period of time before this patch that I can remember in almost every single one of my hell dive games pretty much every player on my team would be running some variation of the same Loadout and the community's reaction to this patch well it was less than Stellar the shared sentiment among the majority of players was that they didn't choose the rail gun because it was a meta weapon but because they had to there was just no way to take down this many heavily armored enemies without an anti-tank weapon and at the time the only good one was the rail gun but not all fans felt the same way there were plenty of those defending the changes even claiming they were good for the game keep in mind the rail gun was probably actually genu broken I can tell you from firsthand experience this thing could do it all and you felt pretty unkillable with it plus the Nerfs aside this patch also buffed numerous items The Punisher flamethrower Laser cannon and both orbital barges all items that are still fairly relevant today however looking back with hindsight it is clear to see that this patch would begin a trend that wouldn't make players very happy it was that fateful March morning that the trend of nerfing fan favorite weapons was born and it seemed like after this every patch that came about completely destroyed a weapon that players loved then next patch after this one they Nerf the Slugger and Arc thrower after that it was the quazar cannon crossbow and Eruptor in the same patch then literally a week later the Eruptor was hit with a second Nerf but it's not just the weapons that have been getting changed throughout these patches they've been making changes to the enemies as well and even adding new enemies that all brings us to today where according to most players The Meta is just stale and boring just like it was in the first month of the game players are essentially back to taking many of the same loadouts because they've made so many weapons so bad but I have to give credit where it's due and can't just cover the vocal majority I don't actually think they've done that bad not to say they've done a good job but throughout these many patches I do actually believe we have a lot more viable weapons than we previously did despite many players taking similar strategems like quazar Cannon and Eagle air strike I will confidently say that I see many different primary secondary and grenades on a game to game basis I genuinely believe there's a pretty good variety of primaries in this game but I think the sentiment of bad patches is coming from people that keep getting their favorite weapons nerfed and there I sympathize with you Eruptor was really good but I don't think a Nerf was worthy definitely not two Nerfs in a row the weapon was really freaking cool and it was one of my favorites in the game but now it's just a Hol shell of what it used to be and we could say the same about almost anything that's been nerfed the rail gun breaker Slugger crossbow and the list goes on but it's not just the Nerf list it's the new weapons that come out that feel like literal garbage the polar Patriots war bond just came out and out of the four weapons included quite literally only one of them the pummeller is good the other three just straight up suck according to most players including self it doesn't matter what side of the balancing conversation you're on because in the end we are spending $10 to get these new war bonds and then weeks later it is rendered useless by a patch that feels really bad there's nothing worse than that hell on top of this the enemies continue to get buffed Patrol spawns changed and solo players literally just got nerfed I understand trying to force multiplayer but anyone could tell you solo is literally hell in its current state it's doable but it's not fun when I was scrolling through Reddit to try to understand the community a little bit better I came across this post and it actually sums it up pretty well remember the first month of this game's launch it was the most positive Community I've ever seen and only soured after the rail gun Nerf then again with the Slugger Ark thrower and now the Eruptor I'll end this section by saying the devs and specifically the CEO himself have expressed their want to change the balancing Direction over the past few days I'll cover this a bit later but as of now nothing has happened on this end and the balancing mishaps have left us here the community is clearly unhappy with where things are from a balancing perspective but just like the honeymoon phase ending this is but a fraction of what's truly going on [Music] here I think a good way to start this chapter is to just show you this game that I played about an hour before recording this I was in the middle of a defense extraction Mission Against automatons All was going well until suddenly two of my teammates lagged out then the automatons stopped spawning it took us a minute to realize but it wasn't just the automatons that stopped working it was the entire mission that had stopped functioning it's as if the entire map just froze the rockets that we needed to launch were not launching so there was nothing we could do the mission was a failure and incidents like these are ones that at first probably make a player laugh but when it happens the second time it's annoying the third time it's frustrating a fourth time you're angry then in all future incidents this just keeps building and piling up until the inevitable breaking point where a player decides screw this I don't want to invest my time into something that breaks so often and break often it does the example I just showed you was a rarer one game-breaking glitches like this don't occur as much as the smaller glitches but the smaller ones build up too and those occur on pretty much every Mission you play from your character randomly falling over because the physics broke to getting stuck under an enemy body to your strategy bouncing off enemy structures isolated these small incidents are fine but when they occur so much it becomes something that plagues the game as mentioned these smaller bugs occur on a game- to game basis but the larger ones like missions breaking or your game just straight up crashing happens way too much as well honestly I'd say I play this game at least once a day at a minimum I usually play at least one Mission most days I play a full operation or more and throughout my 7 Days of playing in a week I'd say I find a game-breaking glitch or crash in at least one or two of the days and while that may not seem like much these things just shouldn't happen in the first place it should be once a month at Max that I'm forced to close my game and relaunch and obviously that's just the major bugs again I find small glitches in pretty much every game I'm in the worst part about all of this is that in every patch they claim to fix in their own words what they call common crashes but then that seems to introduce even more crashes or glitches into the game just take a look at their patch notes this long list of known issues just continues to grow and grow every patch and some of these have been on this list for literally since the day the game came out the spear is a good example of this the targeting has not worked since day one then it was added to the list and has been there ever since that is 3 months of the same gun breaking glitch existing in the game this weapon is near unusable because there is a good chance that when you aim it at an enemy it decides to just not work and glitches like this have been all too prevalent in this game's life this one here the automaton detector Tower strategy glitch where if you throw a strategy next to a detector Tower it just bounces off however the only way to kill detector Towers is with strategems so you end up calling multiple strategems down in an attempt to finally get one to land next to it there's also the damage over time glitch a glitch that existed for nearly 2 months and while it did just get fixed it took way too long this glitch made it so that only the host could deal dot damage this glitch along with many others just boxed out numerous weapons and items in the game which meant along with the balancing changes even less weapons were viable because they just didn't function properly on top of this many content releases came out broken when they added the fourth tier of modules two of them literally didn't work and the third was related to fire damage so it only worked if you were the host this meant that three of the five new pieces of content straight up just didn't work honestly if I were to go through every glitch and bug or crash issue I think this video would end up being like 12 hours long so if you want to read through them yourself there's a wonderful thread here on Reddit by uh forkin farter great name dude anyway Mr forkin made a massive thread detailing almost every patch fail that has happened in this game I'll link it down in the description but spoiler alert there is basically an issue for every patch that has ever came out this should give you a good idea of what players are dealing with when playing the game if you're an active hell diver you have probably run into this stuff multiple times and much like the balancing people are fed up and tired of it during the first month of the game's release there weren't any major content drops the game was still fresh and new and players were satisfied with the content that was already present at launch however even though no major content drops occurred during this time additional missions and small changes would be added every so often to keep every day feeling fresh and unique it kept players on their toes with the prospect that they could see something new when they got on one day it could be a new Mission a new strategy or even a new enemy the best part is is that these things were seemingly stealth added to the game so it wasn't some major patch announcement you saw on social media when you first encountered these things in game it was the first time you experienced them these were good times even though the content editions were small they came weekly and all culminated in the beginning of March when hell diver's first premium war bond was added to the game Cutting Edge introduced three new Primary Weapons a new pistol a new grenade new armor sets with brand new passives and came with additional items like emotes super credits and player banners in hindsight this war bond was probably the best we've ever seen on release the sickle instantly became a fan favorite weapon and is still considered a top five weapon in the game today and The Punisher plasma and R1 12 Blitzer were underwhelming but they were unique you paid $10 or 1,000 super credits and you felt like you were getting something different something impactful that extended to the armor sets which months later are still the only unique armor passives in the game we have not seen them since and no other war bond nor the superstore has introduced a new passive seriously take a step back and look at this war bond through the lens of the time it was released the armor was fully unique the stun grenade was unique the booster was unique the sickle was the first energy assault rifle the R2 Blitzer was the first primary Arc weapon and The Punisher plasma was essentially an energy grenade launcher as a primary if you can't pick up on it yet pretty much everything in this war bond was different from the other Alternatives that existed in the game you paid for this war bond you got fresh experiences and since then that largely hasn't been true we've received two war bonds since Cutting Edge and while there have been some exceptions the weapons that release continue to feel more and more similar or just straight up bad Democratic detonation released with armor sets that were not fully unique a grenade that didn't work because dot damage had not been fixed at this point and a standard assault rifle of which we have plenty of I will admit the booster the Eruptor and the crossbow were definitely unique items but what happens when those items are nerfed just a few weeks later because that's exactly what happened players paid $10 to access this war bond and everybody instantly fell in love with the Eruptor the crossbow was a bit Niche but it had its demographic for sure then just as quickly as we fell in love with these weapons they were not just nerfed but absolutely gutted in patch 1.3 the exploding cross received six different changes which ended up making the weapon infinitely worse despite it being again a niche weapon in all honesty it was an average weapon before the Nerfs and is definitely horrible now after the Nerfs but what they did to the Eruptor this was unforgivable to the community it was nerfed slightly in 1.3 but it was still a great weapon then just days later it was nerfed again this time removing its shrapnel which was a core piece of its identity the shrapnel made it unique and now it was just gone and suddenly just like that the war bond players purchase quickly went from having a few great items to none at all as it stands now it is probably the worst war bond in the game all three weapons are quite terrible and things don't get that much better with the next war bond polar Patriots this is a war bond themed all about ice and snow so surely we get some ice and snow mechanics built into this uh no actually the only type of element that will be in this snow themed war bond will be fire yeah that makes sense that should tell you all you need to know the new weapons aside from the pummeler were not unique and the armor sets once again had passives that were not new but I'm not just going to sit here and review war bonds all day the truth is the war bonds are a very small amount of content that gets added to this game monthly as mentioned there are those small content drops and of course along with those would come some major strategy releases so how have those content drops been going well not great the biggest highlights were adding new enemy types like gunship streakers and Factory Striders but outside of those in the last month or so aside from the war bond this has been the biggest dry spell of content since the game's released since most of these are stealth editions and aren't added into the patch notes there may very well be some I forget here so feel free to let me know but off the top of my head in the last month or so I believe we've gotten one new Mission type in the disabled TCS Mission which was basically just a reskin of the enable TCS Mission then we've gotten one new strategy in the airburst rocket launcher and I think that's it so yeah there hasn't been much and even when the new stuff is added it falls flat because it usually just doesn't work the air burst is a good case of this the weapon released and was practically just a team killer because of how it functioned granted they did fix this in a few days so kudo's there but I don't really even see anyone running the airburst anymore and that's the problem with the content that's what I've been getting at new content is not impactful there hasn't been anything that makes a player say oh I've got to try this and then they hop on the game because everything that releases is just the same as everything else or just sucks the only thing I can remember that genuinely made people extremely excited was the patriot Exo Suit back in early March and once again this released in a broken State the rockets on the exo suit were bugged sometimes killing the user in the suit using the map while in the suit was buggy using a stim caused the game to crash the melee function didn't work enemy targeting was broken and sometimes the EXO suits were delivered in broken or damaged States I don't want to dwell on this for too long but the truth is the new additions to the game especially in the last month or so have just been boring and not enough even the warbonds which usually come packed with the biggest amount of content in one day isn't enough to sustain divers I have an idea where this likely stems from and how to fix it but we'll skip that for now there's one final important piece to this puzzle we need to cover one that isn't in the trio issues plaguing the game but one that Loom much larger and out of arrowheads [Music] control that's right of course I'm talking about Sony's big screw up with a mandatory PSN account linking I feel like I've said this multiple times so far but I don't want to cover this one issue for too long especially not this one because this one was so big I'm sure everyone watching this video has seen plenty of content and news articles covering this it would probably just be a waste of time to sit here and cover the actual events what I'm going to look at is the impact and the aftermath as mentioned at the start of this video the game was already in a downward Trend in terms of player numbers so it's kind of impossible to figure out if there was any drop off in the percentage of players due to this event especially because the change never went through but community-wise this has left a sour taste in players mouths it's been exactly one week since the mandatory account linking was canned by Sony yet 177 countries remain unable to access the game and just 2 days ago three more countries were added to the block list the arrowhead CEO later clarified that this was an error on Sony's end which valve fixed on behalf of them I don't think these countries will stay restricted for too much longer but as it stands now users from those regions cannot buy hell divers 2 in my opinion the damage from this situation has already been done it can be undone and it already slowly is but it will take time when a publisher pulls the rug out from under players like this it can significantly damage their faith and trust in the publisher while I believe Arrowhead actually came out of this controversy looking better due to their resilience and ability to stand up for their players Sony definitely did not even though they reversed the decision they could come out any time and announce another terrible change for the game on top of this it seems like the community backlash has taught them almost nothing ghost of Zima another PlayStation game that is soon to be released on PC just got hit with the same treatment that hell divers 2 did they are now requiring PSN account linking and there's no chance players will reverse this one so if Sony clearly learned absolutely nothing what's to stop them from trying something like this again again in the future that's what many players are worried about and why they're still skeptical to give this game another chance well that and everything else of [Music] course I hope I've been able to paint a clear picture of the current Community but if I haven't just go look for yourself seriously go Venture into some place that people talk online like Discord or Reddit and just see what the people are saying the community is undoubtedly fractured and people are getting more more and more fed up with the game it's not that everybody has stopped playing again the player numbers are still incredibly strong with an average of 108,000 concurrent per day but in the end how long is that going to last if they don't give the community what they want and it's not just one thing that we need it's all of these things the balancing problems the glitches and the lack of impactful content we need all of these things to turn around but it doesn't all need to happen right away that's not possible they can do these one at a time but they have to keep their foot on the gas and that's how I'll close out this video mostly everything in this section is just opinion I'm not a Game Dev or game designer but I have been playing this game since the literal hour it was released and like everyone else watching this video I love it I mean I started making content because of this game no other game has driven me to do that we've got something special here and we want it to stay special but right now it's headed down the wrong path so firstly I think it's balance issues and gameplay instability problems that need to be dealt with first and foremost this is the core of the game and even if they were to release new insane content right now that new content would likely significantly be hindered by The Balancing issues and bugs so in my humble opinion they need to sacrifice new content for the benefit of having more time to work on the balancing and gameplay luckily this was an option that they had in a community poll before so I'm inclined to believe it is possible but I don't want to sit here and list out the exact balancing changes they need to do because I'm not qualified to do that I will leave that to the professionals who I of faith can turn it around I am feeling especially hopeful for this because the developers have sent out many tweets and messages the past few days they've given us a clear picture they are not happy with the current state of balancing and they will be working on it they want to make weapons more powerful and make them feel distinct from one another so let's all hope they stay true to their word and get this done I truly think the best thing for this game right now was to have the current content in the game be more prevalent because as mentioned earlier while there is a fair amount of Loadout diversity right now there is far more unusable content than content that's actually good so let's assume in this reality where I'm totally in charge of Arrowhead the balancing goes in a good direction and many more weapons and items are now usable let's assume simultaneously we have sacrificed this month's war bond and strategy releases to give us more time to fix the major bugs in the game now that puts us in a spot where our game is in a state where ideally there is more good items than bad ones and no bugs or major glitches plague any of the current content that exists wouldn't this be a far better state of game than how it is now which is getting underwhelming new content I personally think so but that leads me to my final and potentially hottest take on how to set things in the right direction we've already sacrificed last month's War Bon to make the current content more impactful but let's keep doing that let's keep sacrificing the frequency of content in return for that content to be even more impactful for example I'd rather have one vastly new Mission type or game mode than get three New Missions throughout the month that all feel the same imagine a mission where it completely turns the game on its head you invade the bug holes themselves you drop in normally but on a tiny map with an entrance to a bug hole in front of you you have time to prepare and call in support weapons but once you go in there's no going out until the mission is over you can't use strategems or resupplies and in this enclosed environment the game would be hectic fun and different or even a new game mode where in instead of dropping into planets and doing a mission we get a true horde based survival mode where the longer you hold out in an outpost or something the more you're rewarded basically like the asset defense Mission except much longer and they get progressively harder both in enemy type and Resource Management Hell Above even these two things I just love to see a real City that we fight in I'm tired of fighting in these same Landscapes over and over every planet feels the same just differently colored and slightly different environmental effects I didn't mention it in the content section but I do believe that is a big reason people are getting burnt out or basically playing these same missions on seemingly the same reskinned Maps but I know my ideas are pretty out of the water and I'm not expecting them to implement them or anything like that but I'd just really love to see a much bigger war bond or something like that just content that matters more it doesn't even have to relate to gameplay itself just give us an armor system overhaul where we can customize with our own colors or let us spend requisition points on customizing our ship just give us something big to do or work towards again a lot of these are just random ideas but the point is the content that releases needs to be more than just one new strategy that nobody ever touches it needs to feel impactful and be worth our time I truly believe if they fix the things laid out in this video both the game and Community will be back on track the game will feel fresh and fun and the community will be back to posting memes and talking about major orders it's sad to see this game I love and see it in this state whether you or I find it fun right now or not we are but individuals in this much wider gaming community and what I'm seeing is that people are just not interested in this game like they were months ago I don't think we'll ever see those Heights again but right now we're definitely down in the depths in terms of player engagement and Community excitement but again that can be turned around I believe in what the CEO says I believe in the devs I Believe in Us the community if we can get Sony to bend to our will I know for a fact we can force some change from Arrowhead and it seems like we've already done this a little bit they want to get the balancing fixed they want to get the bugs fixed they're working on it they've said these things in fact the best way to explain this is from the community manager twinbeard himself he wrote the biggest issue so far has been that the team was overwhelmed by the launch of the game it has taken them time to bounce back and get ahead with the amount of pressure that's been placed on them he says that what can easily be perceived as them being slow or not listening is more the fact that they're not up to speed the game is only 3 months old and they lack time and resources to handle it to everyone's liking they're still hiring and they're still learning so as a community all we can do is continue expressing our thoughts about the game in a respectable Manner and hope for the best we can hope for brighter days ahead and hope that the community can get back to what we were a group of Gamers spreading managed democracy if you made it here till the end thank you so much for watching I appreciate it more than than you know and really just made this video out of passion for the game if you have any different thoughts or opinions than I do leave them down below I would love to discuss drop a sub and a like if you enjoyed it would mean a lot to me and until next time I'll see you on the front line [Music]

Channel: Easy

Views: 293,899

Keywords: Helldivers 2, Helldirvers 2, Helldivers, HD2, Helldivers 1, Helldivers tier list, Tier list, Helldivers best weapons, Helldivers balance, State of Helldiveres, State of Helldivers, State of the game, Helldivers nerfs, Helldivers buffs

Id: 63incTmpmJM

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024