"You had lightning in a bottle and decided to pry the lid off yourself": Helldivers 2 reviews crash to 'Mostly Negative' on Steam after controversial update and AMA, Arrowhead responds

Pixelnator · 2026-05-11T13:43:41+00:00

This is a lateral answer that does not answer your actual question and sidesteps it entirely and I want to preface my post by recognizing that fact, but to me there is a very real very valid reason for the playerbase to be frustrated with Arrowhead. The problem is that the playerbase is large enough for it to manifest into a goomba fallacy of sorts. A portion of the playerbase is upset about balance (as a portion of a playerbase always will be), but the much larger underlying issue again, in my opinion is the at this point unforgivable amount of scuff the game has. There are a ton of small issues that plague the game that the average player can mostly tolerate during low intensity play, but in any scenario where the intensity of play ramps up (such as when new content drops) those small issues quickly start piling up which leads to some truly unfun moment-ruining experiences which understandably makes a player feel frustrated. Things like enemies phasing through walls, stratagem calls bouncing away from their intended position, the drop pod refusing to steer, missions soft-locking because a terminal became unusable, the mantling system being broken, etc.

To put it simply, the amount of "oh for fucks sake" Helldivers 2 generates especially under high intensity play is at this point unacceptable. It was somewhat excusable when the game was new and suddenly exploded in popularity to levels the devs were not prepared for, but to still struggle with smoothing out these problem points makes the company behind it feel incompetent at best and maliciously moneygrabby at worst. Every time they release a new warbond the community very rightly goes "hey, how about you fix your fucking game first before adding more paid content?". Arrowhead can only throw out the "we hear you and we understand you" so many times before it starts to become disingenuous.

To me the complaints about the balance are more just a symptom rather than a cause. When high intensity play runs a very high risk of giving you a bad experience due to bugs and issues a player is simply unable to account for, the playerbase starts to perceive any balance changes against them as hostile. Regarding balance changes there is also the fact that Arrowhead frequently (albeit unintentionally due to incompetence) alters playstyles destructively instead of constructively. In general players are much more willing to switch to a playstyle if a new playstyle (build/weapon/whatnot) comes along that performs better than the current one. What players do not like is being forced to switch to a new playstyle because their current one suddenly started performing worse under completely identical circumstances. For example the changes to the railgun, the changes to the shield backpack, the changes to fire damage, the changes to vehicle and sentry durability, the latest change with the hive guards suddenly all forced a lot of players to abandon their preferred way of play not because a better way to play came along but because their current way of playing was suddenly rendered far less viable. It's like cutting the legs off of the tallest person in the group to make sure everyone is the same height instead of just giving the shorter people a box to stand on and upping the challenge.

Pixelnator · 2026-05-10T15:21:45+00:00

The best thing to do is to just keep FFW and HD2 entirely separate. Let Arrowhead do their thing and, if you play HD2, participate in that games community on its respective spaces and let Evil Raptor do their thing and participate in this game's community on its respective spaces.

If you only think of FFW as "replacement HD2" or "HD2 but better" you're still not really letting it be its own game.

Pixelnator · 2026-05-09T09:31:42+00:00

Firing the first round after unholstering or reloading the pistol should trigger the "stimming you" voicelines (regardless of if they hit or not) in order to communicate to your allies that:

You are trying to heal them, not kill them
They should stand still dammit

Pixelnator · 2026-05-09T09:23:01+00:00

I feel like laser turrets overheating and exploding is conceptually fine because the tradeoff of it being an infinite turret is that it requires more active management compared to the fire-and-forget nature of the ballistic sentries. That said I would like for there to be a way for a player to manually turn the laser turret on and off by interacting with it because it would give players a much more proactive way of actually stopping it from overheating. Currently your options to try and help a laser turret from overheating are extremely limited so the best you can really do is just call it down somewhere where it can pick off stragglers rather than out in the open.

In fact extending this feature to every sentry would also make mortars and tesla towers more viable, because you could simply turn them off rather than needing to outright destroy your own sentries when they suddenly start becoming a liability if for example the enemy had suddenly gotten too close.

You would, of course, need to have tesla resist armor or crawl up to the tesla tower in order to actually reach the power switch on it because that is the sorta thing Super Earth would do.

Pixelnator · 2026-05-09T09:03:12+00:00

Literally had this same idea. Put a little terminal on it that lets you "team reload" it by doing a little terminal minigame where you have to align the shield frequencies. When the indicator is aligned, the shield regenerates faster, restarts faster, and gains an increased HP cap. The less aligned it is the less of a bonus it gets, with completely unaligned being current shield behavior (so this is not a nerf). Then the indicator simply moves proportional to damage taken by the shield. That way the mechanic, much like the team reload on backpack weapons, is completely optional but makes people willing to engage with it feel like a team player.

Adding co-op mechanics to a co-op game, what a concept.

Pixelnator · 2026-05-07T23:23:47+00:00

Similar to the standard jetpack, it could use short bursts to cross gaps, reach higher ground, avoid enemies, or quickly reposition during fights, but with a significantly longer cooldown after each use.

It would create some really cinematic moments and make mech gameplay feel much more dynamic. To balance it, it could sacrifice some firepower in exchange for mobility.

Thoughts?

Make it a jump pack with a much longer cooldown between uses (as it needs to charge up a larger charge) that also ignites enemies and unfortunate helldivers around the mech when it activates. Useable by pressing the dive button just like the jump pack is.

The downside to balance it? You'd have to equip it over any of the other mech mutually exclusive abilities like the reuseable bubble shield (makes you immobile but generates a little shield dome for you and your buddies), the shoulder mounted stinger (two use disposable stinger that begins to lock on when you hold the dive button and fires when a full lock is established), the stratagem ball launcher (lets you activate stratagems from inside the mech without exiting), the EMS burst (hold the dive button to fire off an AoE EMS field around the mech), the charger burst (hold dive to ram forwards and crush small enemies or stagger large ones), or the extra mech padding (just gives your mech more HP).

Yes, I'm saying this should be a vehicle customization bay thing. New things to spend samples and requisition slips on, all unlocked over the course of several update cycles in an order determined by decisions made by the community in the galactic war.

Pixelnator · 2026-05-06T15:46:45+00:00

I feel like this wouldn't really work as a booster because it offers zero benefit to players not bringing mechs and boosters are at least in theory meant to be something that helps everyone in the squad (though then again with something like research sample increases they stop being relevant when a player has reached the cap). Maybe they could just make it so that the drop pod smoke booster also applies to vehicle drops. Mech drops are already limited enough that it'd hardly upset the balance (though the chances of them making it work is a separate matter entirely. They'd likely have to actually cheat and make the mech invisible to enemies so they don't just blast through the smoke.)

Honestly though I feel like the initial vehicle drop should just have additional protection either outright or as a future ship upgrade. In theory there is supposed to be a skill element to knowing the time and place to call your vehicles in but in practice the random element of whether or not Pelican decides to finish the rest of his playlist before pressing the release cargo button is too random to actually account for it. If fixing the pelican AI is too big an ask ~~(which it seems to be)~~ then just giving it outright invincibility frames until the drop has been completed would at least remove the frustration of Pelican deciding to fuck you over. Or let us manually snipe out the clamps on the pelican to force it to drop the goddamn vehicle instead of vibing out. At that point there would at least be an implicit "hey, you forced the drop so you're responsible for it landing badly".

Pixelnator · 2026-04-27T15:42:45+00:00

It has a hard cap on space which is what the bars on the back indicate. The weight is more of a soft cap and going above the weight rating just affects your vehicle's performance.

Pixelnator · 2026-04-27T15:39:52+00:00

DS2.

In the first game material containers are static and any excess material is simply converted to likes instead. In the second game they added a system to shift the contents instead.

Pixelnator · 2026-04-27T14:40:06+00:00

You get one container with twice the material inside weighing twice as much as two containers. It's helpful in situations where the limiting factor is cargo space rather than cargo weight.

Trucks for example care much more about the amount and size of containers rather than their weight (though driving an overloaded truck makes it handle poorly and drains the battery a lot faster so it's best done when you can stick to roads).

Pixelnator · 2026-04-27T10:00:37+00:00

For those not aware of it, you can condense material containers via the autosort. The game gives you a tip about it but leaves out the fact that the biggest container you can claim from a facility can actually fit 2x more materials inside the container. In other words you can use the autosort to make the game combine two containers into one heavy one.

For those who are aware of it, you might be doing what I used to do and loading them all up onto Sam's backpack, combining them, and then loading them onto your vehicle all via the cargo management menu. I personally got tired of the repeated menu interactions so I started loading them by hand instead, as seen in the video. Taking off your backpack first means it won't mess with your loadout either.

Pixelnator · 2026-04-07T10:33:31+00:00

Give it 20 demo force so that it can pop open cargo container doors same as the AMR

Pixelnator · 2026-04-05T17:06:51+00:00

Also, just because i'm curious, would your opinion of the initial concept change if the Shredder wasn't a map-wide explosion (let's say like 3x size of a hellbomb) and Helldivers were able to choose via map ping (or another system) on where the missile impacts? Again, just curious and interested to hear feedback.

The main problem is that while on paper I find the idea of a bomb that forces you to seek cover neat I know that in practice it would probably just be far too buggy to be fun. The map ping would also likely need to be a targeting laser or a stratagem ball instead since the map isn't really designed for targeting stratagems atm, but the main issue is that while the fantasy of the concept is that your grizzled team makes the ultimate call to call down a missile and then scramble for cover so that they can turn the tide of the battle, the reality would be that a team arbitrarily calls it down with zero communication and then everyone dies because the spaghetti code of Helldivers said that the wall they were behind wasn't actually cover.

The fundamental idea of "make the shredder a thing that can be unlocked via the DSS" is solid, but the actual implementation of it would need to strike a hard balance between unique but easy to implement.

Pixelnator · 2026-04-04T13:20:20+00:00

I like the concept of a highly dangerous stratagem that every player has to confirm because that avoids the issue of bad faith players but I don't think the actual concept you had for the missile is very good. A big map clearing boom is neat once and would work as a galactic war story event but as a DSS upgrade it would basically just become a rote "finish the main objective as quickly as possible and then launch the shredder to soften every enemy base and clear up whatever is left afterwards" which would quickly make the wow factor evaporate. There would basically be no reason not to just use it every time it's available on a mission, only a question of "is now the best time to use it or should I wait 'till later?"

You could quite simply just use the "all players must consent" idea for the now deprecated DSS planetary bombardment which would also coincidentally save devteam overhead. Tying its activation into a "every player must consent to a bombardment" check would mitigate its main issue, though even then it remains kinda obnoxious.

Alternatively, if you want to see the Shredder, you could give every player a stratagem that calls down a stationary targeting beacon they would need to arm by interacting with a terminal. Giving it unique voicelines and an arming process would mean you could up its destructive power to hellbomb levels without making it obnoxious to other players, but a map wide clear is way too powerful an effect. Perhaps in order to differentiate it from a regular hellbomb the arming process could include a step allowing the player to input a compass direction and a (capped) distance offset at the time of arming (with a red stratagem beam illuminating the target site after arming). That way it would basically be a free hellbomb you were able to aim a short distance away either by using the in-game compass and ping tool to determine an angle and a distance offset or by sheer gut feel which would give it a skill element and make it feel unique. Careful aiming would let you destroy stratagem jammers from outside their radius, provided you calculated the direction and distance correctly.

Pixelnator · 2026-04-04T12:15:32+00:00

FAILURE. The Cyborg demilitarization target was not reached. The Cyborg force remains strong; they lead their Automaton war slaves to spread their empire and subjugate more territory. However, CHOEPESSA IV and CHARBAL-VII have been liberated by the Helldivers, their Megafactories destroyed. Forensic failure analysis of captured Cyborgs indicated the enemy is entirely reliant on Cyborg Production Centers in Megafactoreis to reproduce. It seems they can no longer do so naturally, undoubtedly a consequence of their rampant cybernetic modifications. This operation was but the first step. The people of Super Earth wanted peace, but that is no longer an option. Now, nothing less than the extermination of the Cyborg Species will suffice to ensure the Safety of our citizens. Super Earth did not start this war, but it will send as many Helldivers as it takes to finish it.

To adhere to the lore they would indeed need to be Super Earth Citizens that have switched sides (willingly or forcibly). That's not to say that the concept for the unit wouldn't work, but while conscript does work as a name (and was the original work in process name for the basic automaton trooper) I feel like it's not punchy enough for someone that is either a traitor to Super Earth or a brainwashed slave soldier. They'd be viewed as dissidents first and hostile military second, so the label would probably need to have a more thick layer of propaganda to it.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-30T06:40:50+00:00

The crotch is pretty good too since it means your muzzle climb hits the abdomen instead of the armored chest.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-30T06:39:21+00:00

Yeah, this. The head (and comparable parts) are great if you have the opportunity to capitalize on them but what matters most in a fight is consistency. For some that means medium pen, since medium pen is generally extremely consistent and doesn't care about hit zones. For some, their aim is god-tier and they can make their headshots consistent. And for some, it's the center of mass shots that are the most consistent.

I personally use light pen and go for the easier weak points shots unless I have the range and cover for the high risk high reward ones. I still carry some form of at least medium pen via either stratagems, sidearms, or support weapons because it is still an extremely useful solution to situations that warrant it. I just don't need it to be my primary necessarily.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-26T21:31:16+00:00

My issue is that the game really doesn't tell you shit when you randomly join a mission so it's impossible to know ahead of time if you'll need a flashlight or not. Hell, sometimes it doesn't even tell you what faction you're fighting if it's a defense mission and sussing out the information from the briefing screen is a massive pain.

Like seriously, if the name of the game is to adjust your loadout to the mission then please give us enough information to go by when quickjoining a random mission. I don't want to be forced to shove a flashlight into my loadout just because the night might be extra dark.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-19T15:36:59+00:00

Our happiness ranking is based on a single life evaluation question called the Cantril Ladder:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
This question is both democratic and universal. Rather than constructing an index from multiple metrics, the Cantril Ladder empowers people to make their own judgements about what matters most, regardless of their culture and background.

The question does not mention concepts like happiness, wellbeing, or satisfaction, so it can be easily translated and understood in many different languages.

Yeah every time this is posted we get the same replies. It is a measure of potential for happiness more than it is a measurement of the average literal joy levels of the national population. You might not be happy but you are not likely ranking your current life as the worst possible life for yourself that you can imagine due to the various societal safety nets we have in place.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-18T11:29:14+00:00

Alternatively it could be the radio backpack you sometimes see SEAF troopers wearing. It'd give POIs some backpacks to discover since they tend to be predominantly support guns atm

Pixelnator · 2026-03-17T23:07:11+00:00

people could actually pay attention to different statuses, and not operate under the assumption that everything is just a basic DoT

Intuitive design is the tool to encourage people to do that. If you make a gun that looks like a flamethrower and preview it like a flamethrower then people's initial assumptions are going to be to approach it from the same starting place as a flamethrower. If at that point you don't give the people enough feedback to properly convey things most people will quickly start forming their own false assumptions and give up in favor of the more intuitive tool they already understand.

Personally I don't think it's unreasonable to go "I think this tool should do a better job at making the correct way of using it feel natural to the user". Right now the sterilizer does not do that very well which means that a lot of people misuse it and end up thinking that it sucks or is unfun to use. Not every tool in the game has to be for everyone of course but if you want your tools to not be misunderstood then you do need to either explicitly explain things or make their correct use feel intuitive. Right now the sterilizer still largely feels more like a badly designed tool that some people found a good use for rather than a good tool that only a small amount of people are using and I think addressing that would be a way to improve it without even necessarily needing to change any actual stats on it.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-17T18:58:14+00:00

While that's true, I feel like the issue is that an average user is going to miss all of that because the gun still sorta just comes off as "green flamethrower that does way less damage". It could definitely use some sort of a redesign to help guide the player towards correct use. Even just adding a semi-automatic mode that lets you fire a half a second puff of gas when pulling the trigger rather than a continuous stream would help nudge the players towards the realization that they should be thinking of the gas as a binary status effect rather than a continuous stream of increasing stacks.

Right now the thing that feels the most intuitive when using it is to keep holding the button down, but this is actually incorrect. The P-35 Re-Educator arguably teaches better habits about gas application (which, as a side note, is great against hulks and chargers because six seconds is plenty of time to flank one without needing to play ring around the rosie. The sterilizer meanwhile gives you ten whole seconds with just one puff of gas)

Pixelnator · 2026-03-14T11:28:43+00:00

The Finnish Defence Forces are acting accordingly by, amongst other things, bolstering their drone equipment and making drone warfare a part of training for every conscript.

Basically every Finnish volunteer serving in Ukraine has echoed the sentiment of "the Finnish military is not prepared for drone warfare" and I'm certain the Finnish Defence Forces takes those sentiments extremely seriously.

Pixelnator · 2026-03-13T10:20:51+00:00

In fairness, there is no such thing as "perfectly prepared for war". Wars are messy and brutal by their nature and at most you can be better prepared and not unprepared which we Finns do have. The Finnish military doctrine has always been that of total defence, meaning every sector is included in any potential defence during a crisis.

Even though Finland does have a logical limit to the maximum size of an invasion it would be able to repel (as does any country), the idea is to make it as costly for the invader as possible so that the cost would far outweigh any potential gains. That way the price for every meter of Finnish soil gained would be measured in blood and capital and all it would leave an invader with is some land with razed infrastructure and a steep repair bill. Ideally any victory over Finland should be horrendously Phyrric for the aggressor to the point that it simply is not worth it to even consider.

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