Six months along, I think the key takeaway from Helldivers 2 is that no good thing can reasonably last in this ecosystem. Its launch back in February was marked by a meteoric ascent to the top of the charts, but the past few months have been marred by controversy and upheaval that has hurt the game and the reputation of the the team behind it. As sad as it is to admit, things were always going to turn out this way, but it’s still tough seeing the place it’s landed compared to where it once was.
Helldivers 2 couldn’t have started in a better way. It launched at $40 as opposed to the industry standard of $60, which is now rising to $70. And for those $40, you were allowed to play pretend within its satirized and messy war playing out across the galaxy. It cast players as highly replaceable pawns in Super Earth’s army, which finds itself in the middle of a “second Galactic War” against other forces vying for control of the system. It’s an inherently ridiculous premise that walks and talks like a playable version of Starship Troopers.
At first, you could only face off against the Terminids, which are a bug-like alien species that descend on players in overwhelming numbers. Soon enough though, a second front of the war manifested against an army of robots that really plunged players into the deep end. To combat those odds, Helldivers 2 encouraged folks to invite their friends into the fray and rendered momentous experiences from the chaos that’d ensue.
That was the real thing that I feel sold Helldivers 2 to so many people: it seemed to love mess. The game itself ultimately proved to be a little too glitchy for its own good, but at the outset, it kind of valued this sense of incongruity and wrongness, and even spun it into a fun aspect of the game. I don’t log in to Helldivers 2, drop into the action to “do my part,” and feel terribly triumphant. I certainly exclaim after we successfully extract from a mission, but I walk away from these skirmishes thinking, “What the hell are we doing here? We’re getting lit up by killer robots who are thinning our literal manpower and then getting vivisected by bugs. We’re barely making it, what the fuck.” And that was an exhilarating feeling that nothing else was providing.
I spend most of my time in the game running away from all the things trying to kill me. In the meantime, Impalers’ tentacles are bursting out of the ground and sending me flying. Robots are tearing me to bits. My own flying laser sentry can’t distinguish between friend and foe, often setting me on fire or slicing through an ally in an instant. My own friends will call down heavy artillery from our battleships in orbit that wind up incinerating fellow team members in order to eradicate bug nests. And when you finally extract from a nightmare of a mission, you emerge back onto the ship a bloody mess.
Things continued to look up for Helldivers 2 for a few months. New features like pilotable mech suits were woven into larger storylines playing out over the weeks. Major orders taught the community to work together toward common goals. Strategies formed, teams were decided on, and battles were fought. Malevelon Creek, a famously embattled planet in Helldivers 2’s first months, became an almost religious site, and is now commemorated with an in-game holiday. For months, writing about Helldivers 2 felt like writing about an entirely different beast every few weeks.
For a while there, Helldivers 2 was almost perceived as punk by the players who loved it. Here was this game that bucked every big trend, from pricing to release cadence. This game that was heavy metal and messy and audacious. It was an overnight sensation in an industry that often glorifies highly polished and sanitized experiences over something as rough and tumble as Helldivers 2. It was an outlier blazing some new path forward.
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Before long though, things shifted for the worse. Suddenly, the sweeping changes that Arrowhead Studios was making all the time stopped being novel, and became more of a hindrance. Arrowhead stopped being the architects of players’ dreams and fantasies; instead they became this kind of collar around the community’s neck. Balance changes continued to drastically change the game every other week, upsetting both veteran and casual players alike. Sure, Helldivers 2 prided itself on being a bit of a mess, but what it really needed was some foundation that wouldn’t be eroded by an update five days later.
Everything that people championed about the game at the beginning came right back around to bite it in the ass, but how could we expect anything else? This is what these games do and are about. These are the incredibly fickle “models” of games that we’re inheriting and continuously propping up. By throwing your weight behind them, you tacitly approve of these kinds of shifts. For better and certainly for worse, you commit to the ups and downs of this journey.
Unfortunately the community hasn’t always seen it that way. While Helldivers 2 has its loving and loyal fans, video games tend to have audiences capable of immense vitriol, and Helldivers 2 and its developers have certainly experienced their fair share of that venom in a short time. Look no further than the PSN login drama that nearly ended the game, and from which Arrowhead is still reeling. An unforced error in judgment from the game’s publisher caused an unpopular mandate to go out which quite literally ripped the game’s burgeoning global community apart. I’m almost sure that there are still countries and regions in the world where Helldivers 2 hasn’t returned to PC storefronts because they couldn’t support PSN and were forced to pull the game.
Anyone with some sense might’ve told Sony that requiring a PSN account to play a game you bought on a different platform was boneheaded, but the move really put Arrowhead on its backfoot since it had to bear the brunt of the backlash. Due to an incredibly reckless ploy, a studio and game that requires an engaged and recurring community to stay afloat suddenly found itself on the outs through no fault of its own. The worst part is that even though Sony eventually walked back the mandate, the target on Arrowhead’s back has never really gone away, and as I wrote a few months back, it started to seem like the game just couldn’t catch a break.
Now, every update is met with some level of trepidation. If Arrowhead does something the community deems even remotely out of line, its fans pounce on it with an intensity I’ve rarely seen so up close. Sometimes, that means that the studio is heralded when popular changes are implemented, like a balance patch that strengthened some abilities in the game over a month ago. However for every one of those patches, there are ones like the most recent update, which has once again sparked a fire under the community and is motivating many to up and abandon the game. I fear that Helldivers 2 and Arrowhead are now in a vicious cycle of their own making.
It’s a shame because Helldivers 2 is still as great as it ever was. I’ve recently picked it up again after a major update released earlier this week, and when you’re not preoccupied with being the very best player ever, it’s still a blast unlike most anything else on the market. I just hope others wise up to that before the various forces pushing and pulling on the game and its developers undo everything that they worked so hard to create.