Trouble in Paradise

I’ve been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 recently; which would shock no reader of this blog since it’s universally accepted as “good game” with rock solid shooting mechanics and a damn good gameplay loop. What can I say, I like it when the guns feel good to shoot and enemies feel good to shoot at. A lot of my friends think so too, I’d rarely play alone if a majority of said friends didn’t live two continents away (I love time zones!)

Regardless, the sentiment isn’t shared by everyone, as is all things, and unfortunately one of my closest friends can’t seem to get their head wrapped around this whole thing. In one of my attempts to indoctrinate them for the cause, I remember we went for the ship acquisitions menu; the list where you can buy new stratagems. They were struck by horrid choice paralysis and asked me which stratagem they should choose, and the answer “it depends” doesn’t really work when they don’t understand what the parameters that their choices would depend on even are. For example, at level 3, a Helldiver can unlock the Recoilless Rifle and the Expendable Anti-Tank (E.A.T for short). With my 180 hours on the game, I know the pros and cons of each, how the Recoilless Rifle deals more damage and has a funky High Explosive mode to deal with crowds (even though it’s kind of a waste of ammo), and the E.A.T benefits from a really short cooldown and comes with two units that you can share with a friend like a KitKat and shred like two Bile Titans with a good shot to the head, you can even kill a third tank if you get the hellpod to land on them.

That information would be good enough to make an informed choice, but the game never tells you any of that. All you get is video footage and like two sentences:

E.A.T

• A single-use weapon specialized for damaging vehicle armor. Discarded after every use.

Recoilless Rifle

• A recoilless rifle effective against vehicle armor. Includes support backpack required for reloading.

Further not helping is that my friend didn’t know what a tank even was. It says Vehicle in the weapons description, and if you’re playing against bugs (which you likely are because they’re the ones you shoot at in the tutorial and the trailers), they don’t have anything in their armies that registers as a “vehicle”! The descriptions and the words went over their heads because what does any of that even mean? The tutorial, despite being wonderfully brief and to the point, never explains the concept of armor: one of the most fundamental elements of Helldivers combat structure. And while the starter loadout is pretty balanced to deal with most threats: The Liberator is a light penetration assault rifle for crowds, the Peacemaker is a small sidearm for when you run out of ammo for the Liberator, the Machine Gun is for bigger enemies that the other two options can’t kill; and if nothing else works, you call the Precision Orbital Strike.

This is all well and good, but you’re not going to figure this out on your own! I sure as hell didn’t. And it’ll be even harder to understand what the hell is going on if you’re playing with friends who are probably more experienced than you, either sending you to impossible missions to fend for yourself while they play like they’re used to or trying to dump all of that technical jargon on you at once. Either case, it left them bloated with info and not very eager to come back to the game.

Helldivers is not a game that aims to be for absolutely everyone. It has a target audience, it knows what it wants to be and it does that wonderfully. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t make an effort to make its mechanics and wiki-load of information more presentable, especially because the best way to learn how this game functions is either by trial-and-error, or opening the goddamn wiki. The dreaded Terraria Syndrome.

The acquisition menu is a goddamn mess, too. You start with the Patriotic Administration Center, which has mostly support weapons, colored in blue, good start. After that, Orbital Cannons, which have orbital barrages colored in red, cool. Then we get to the Hangar, it has most of the Ariel Strikes colored in red… and a car. And the Jump Pack. Both blue. Ok.

Then we get into a bit of a mess with the Bridge which has.. Three Orbital type stratagems and some defensive structures, colored in green. But the orbital strikes should be in the Orbital Cannons sections, no? Engineering Bay has support weapons! And mines! Robotics Workshop has turrets, a drone and two exo-suits!

From a lore and world building perspective? Grade A. You can really imagine how a Super Destroyer works and what each part is responsible for in the Helldivers personal arsenal to combat tyranny and whatever the fuck. But for a new player, this adds another layer of confusion. The same issue persists with Weapon Customization but that only opens up for level 10 and by then most of the newbie fog should wear off.

However, that brings me to problem number two:

Progression.

Another good friend of mine made significantly more progress in the game than the first one but feels reluctant to play Helldivers because to him, it feels like a job. You get in, kill a bunch of bugs, do the same-y objectives, kill more bots, die, respawn, call extraction and leave. Or fail, that’s also an option. A lot of the problems he has I can surmise come from the first issue I was talking about. The game is complex, but gives new players a hard time understanding what they’re even engaging with. And worse, in my opinion, doesn’t give them a lot of what to look forward to as a reward for their hard work. Playing the game is the reward! I can hear the imaginary strawman in my head squawk at me, but it’s not enough to keep a player hooked. Progression and rewards are important to keep a player engaged, it’s exciting to play the game and even more so to have something to look forward to when you get back to the super destroyer after a long struggle. After an average of 30 to 40 minutes of a mission, it feels like you should be at least able to get something new to dispense democracy with, but you’d be disappointed to find that isn’t always the case.

In Helldivers, rewards come in 5 flavors. XP to level up your account and weapons and unlock new stratagems up to level 25. Requisition Slips, to buy said stratagems and customization for your weapons. Samples come in three varieties, common, rare and super, are used to buy Ship Modules. Medals are used to unlock content in Warbonds, this game’s version of the battlepass, which you get a free one when buying the game. Which brings me to Super Credits, the premium currency of the game, which is used to buy Premium Warbonds or buy stuff from the Superstore.

That’s a lot of currency types, and up to level 30-ish, the progression loop is fine. You unlock things at a solid pace, new stratagems, new armor and guns from the warbond, maybe a few Ship Modules if you’re dedicated to collecting samples. But when you finish the free warbond it comes to a screeching halt (which to be fair would take some time since it’s 10 pages compared to premium Warbonds that usually only have three.)

Without anything to spend them on, medals start piling up. After you buy all the stratagems available to you, Requisition slips are only used for weapon customization (I’ll get to that.) Ship Modules gets REALLY expensive, to a point that even after 180 hours I still didn’t buy all of them because they require some absurd amounts for each— and they’re not very exciting either (most recent example was the Atmospheric Monitoring upgrade which cost 200 commons, 150 rares, 15 supers and 25,000 RS to reduce HE barrage spread by 15%. There are only 2 HE barrages in the game. Big woop.)

Weapon customization feels unfinished. Best case scenario, you can switch a weapon’s mag sizes, optics, underbarrels and muzzles. But in most scenarios, you can only switch a weapon’s optics. Sometimes, just the colors. And they’re not very interesting colors. The adjustments on the weapons essentially boils down to: do you want better ergonomics or do you want better spread? Ergonomics is how fast the weapon drags after your cursor, by the way. They don’t tell you that in the game, why would they. It could be so much more than this, adjustments that could really feel like you’re changing the weapon to suit you better; games like Battlefield and shit, even Deep Rock Galactic have weapon customizations so deep, Deep Rock gets away with only having three primary guns per class with how deeply you can change them. Why stop at primary weapons either? Customize the pistols, the grenades! Let me put a normal fucking scope on the railcannon you cowards!

Overall, Helldivers 2 is a game I love deeply; it’s why I want it to be more accessible and more inviting for my friends to play it with me so I won’t be alone! Making a build and trying out new stuff is the best part about this game in my opinion. Making the rounds to get resources and funds to build a freak of nature laser gun is something I haven’t seen since Loadout (Fucking hell) and I really miss it. Anyway, they should really increase the amount of Supercredits you get, I know it’s painfully slow to incentivise you to buy it, like, with money, but fuuuuck man! I hate microtransactions! (and yet I still buy them!) Because all the fun stuff is in the shit that costs money!!!!!!!