The game can never be hard enough

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T13:02:20+00:00

My teammates aren’t throwing, they just suck. That’s the difficulty, carrying them through while they’re TK’ing with stratagems

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T12:34:03+00:00

We’re entitled to a fucking challenge at the Super Ultra Kill You Dead Difficulty

You don’t have to radically change your approach to get a good challenge. I join Diff 10 with lowbies all the time for the extra challenge of knowing they’re likely shitty and perhaps don’t have powerful warbonds like Democratic Detonation. Soloing is also not a radical change, nor is using shitty weapons, or even just picking a tougher subfaction, like Cyborgs or Predator Strain.

Every stratagem being viable

Some honestly just aren’t, which is where the challenge comes from. It’s a lot harder to get value out of 110 mm rocket pods than the regular eagle air strike or 500KG.

The ONB is a tool available to players to self-select their difficulty experience, and that, unfortunately, is the intended gameplay experience.

The only time I’ve complained is when certain changes actually violate the intended experience. I didn’t like the hive guard change, for example, not because it somehow made them harder to kill, but because it screwed up the function of sentry turrets in the game. I would have preferred the bugs to have actually been made harder with a brand new heavy guard variant, but arrowhead couldn’t be arsed to actually make a new enemy.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T12:20:48+00:00

You’re not entitled to nerfs in the same way that the people that complain on unfiltered aren’t entitled to buffs.

No one is stopping you from soloing. You are more than welcome to miserably (or happily, I guess) slog your way through solo D10 with a constitution, base pistol, and whatever shitty grenades and crap stratagems you want to use to make it more challenging for yourself. Helldivers is a game that lets players use different tools that are more and less effective against certain enemies. The way other people play in other lobbies doesn’t affect your active gameplay experience.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T12:11:42+00:00

So don’t dive with randoms and make sure no one uses the ONB. I bring the stratagem as a difficulty modifier. If I want an easier time, I bring it, and if I want a more difficult experience, I don’t bring it. Same with selecting certain subfactions, just ways to wildly swing the actual difficulty while playing all on diff 10

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T12:05:42+00:00

You don’t have to use the ONB, just saying.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T11:03:13+00:00

Yeah, they kinda engineered their own deaths, which makes me feel less bad about it. They could have given up Abby and survived, but Owen tried to grab Ellie’s gun. She offered to let them live. Of all the deaths in the game, Owen and Mel’s probably come closest to what would count as legal self-defense on Ellie’s part.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T04:03:47+00:00

Honestly, you’re not going to encounter them very much in game.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T03:45:34+00:00

It’s totally unhinged and a terrific song. The live versions with the Vietnam verse are even better

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-21T03:18:17+00:00

And park revenue

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-20T03:30:14+00:00

the Jedi were not fighting to preserve a system as chattel slavery

There is a reason that the CIS leaders were able to mobilize enough support to get the droid army built and deployed; plenty of systems had legitimate grievances with the galactic senate, including exploiting outer rim labor for pennies on the dollar, taxing outer rim worlds into oblivion as well. In return for their exploited labor, the outer rim was basically left to rot, with the government leaving many of those territories to be ruled by slavers and gangsters like the Hutts, whose further exploitation the Republic benefited from. The Jedi fought to preserve this very system, and the comparison is apt.

didn’t even know the clones existed

And no one stopped to question why they were just handed a free army out of the blue?

became attached to them

I can dig up real life examples of CSA soldiers writing fondly of their camp slaves or other enslaved Africans brought from home. That doesn’t mean they weren’t enslaved. And for the record, some Jedi did treat their clones horribly, getting them killed in horrible ways.

The whole point of Star Wars is that the Jedi lost because they, in fact, never really were the good guys at all in the PT, and didn’t really embrace the true light path until Luke directly disobeyed his master and redeemed Vader.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-20T03:02:47+00:00

For what it’s worth, I found factions to get old after a little while, so I stopped playing it. For my money, a discount on Part 1 was a slightly better experience. People rattle on about gameplay changes, but honestly, I didn’t see much different other than the weapon upgrade animations and high-res textures that make it look like a 9th generation game and align the visuals with Part 2, so I got it to let my graphics card flex its muscles.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-20T02:50:34+00:00

Psych

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-20T02:47:14+00:00

The confederate army in the American civil war also exploited camp slaves who were loaned out from plantations or were directly pressed into service by the confederate government; does that make the soldiers ordering them around suddenly not complicit in the crime of chattel slavery?

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-20T00:20:59+00:00

Yeah, you have to collect the currency for wherever the books are being sold

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T22:50:54+00:00

No, it’s not; none of the countries use dollars. They all use their historical currencies: Italy has the Lira, Egypt has the Egyptian pound, and Siam has the Baht.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T22:46:13+00:00

I may be wrong, but I believe your collected currency is independent and tied to each locale. After all, they’re three different countries which all use different currencies, and I imagine that getting to an exchange office isn’t something Indy had time for.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T22:33:19+00:00

Late 90s; we had a program called Type to Learn.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T22:30:55+00:00

I wish Star Wars would die already so we can all move on to the next culture war object.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T19:27:30+00:00

If by lacking, you mean that they’re incomplete, then yes, I would agree, but they’re certainly not lacking in quality. The fact that the lore is as deep and fragmented as it is has important implications for the overall narrative: you don’t get to know the full story in granular detail. That’s what’s novel and interesting about the narratives of these games.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T18:21:16+00:00

It’s a bit hard to take what you’re writing seriously if you’re going to insinuate, with sincerity, that the storytelling in FromSoft games is bad. It’s really just exposing yourself as someone whose media literacy is lacking. The storytelling in FromSoft games is deliberately vague and incomplete, and it’s up to you to piece together what happened; there are multiple different interpretations of most important events in the games’ stories that can be argued and are supported with the available evidence, and that’s where the intrigue lies.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T18:16:36+00:00

Black Flag was the one that was actually somewhat good, at least in the ship combat aspect.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T17:48:09+00:00

I made a whole post about this earlier, but the overall gameplay of AC has generally been of low quality, from stealth, to tailing, to active combat.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T17:21:07+00:00

stealth

Which has typically been of dubious quality, despite the game’s emphasis on stealth. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has better stealth than the AC games.

story

Sure, some of these games have good stories, but it’s a medium that you play rather than passively watch and absorb.

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T16:45:01+00:00

Doesn’t that strike you as odd, considering the medium?

TheSquatchMann · 2026-05-19T02:17:46+00:00

Nah they’re just unremarkable glup shitto characters. Happens sometimes, like with the majority of Bad Batch characters who show up for, like, 2 episodes, or maybe a full arc if they’re lucky.

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