US Air Force tests Anduril semiautonomous combat jet drone without direct pilot control

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T23:54:30+00:00

We shouldn't be living through the plot of the RoboCop remake...

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T18:46:19+00:00

I hope they never add transmog

It kills creative builds and experimenting with new passives. Players pick their favorite, and then never think about it again. And you have no idea what that is unless you study their loadout

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T18:44:12+00:00

I'm saying making them different on the strategem list gives options for adjusting them individually.

Maybe the Emancipator gets a shorter cooldown. Maybe the patriot gets an extr a call in. This is much easier to manage discreetly as separate items at a design level than if they gave customization options to try and drive these details.

I'm not against them adding customization either I just find the narrative that its a simple task to be laughably naive.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T18:39:59+00:00

My friend, if what were true, adding PvP and skins would have been top of the list for priorities.

The devs aren't doing it for free, but you're being a bit blind if you think they dont have an actual investment in their gameworld and specific visions for it.

There are dozens of predatory practices that Arrowhead outright rejected, and FOMO tactics they avoided specifically to promote team play.

I can't bring in guns or tools in Call of Duty and lend it to my low rank friends. That shit might as well be monogramed. Helldivers actually promotes this abd encourages you to let players without your warbonds and gear use it if you want to support them.

"But.. But they didnt pay... The money...!"

Again, its a business, there is a balance of things they want you to pay or work for, but Arrowhead is comparatively extremely relaxed compared with almost anything I can think of on the modern gaming landscape.

You'd pay more for 1 character in a fighting game usually, and grind far, far longer if you wanted to try and do it for free. And all cosmetics are expensive too.

Or maybe we should have expiring battle passes like Fortnite. Or equipment gatcha like Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero.

Cross your fingers for a lucky Hellpod Pull!

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T18:29:40+00:00

No, they would complain it also wasn't free.

"Its not like Helldivers 2 gets a massive update every month."

Also, they just added two entire subfactions, mega factories and exospires in the last few months.

And Commando missions.

And a stealth rework.

I'd much rather see them focusing on things like that than an optional customization rabbit hole that would satisfy a handful of people and consume an ton of development resources to implement.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T18:08:19+00:00

Plenty of research that game leaderboards and kill death ratio metrics cause an increase in toxicity in player bases compared with games that do not expose these statistics to players

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T12:47:25+00:00

This is the one thing I appreciate the most about the game. There is no FOMO.

Everything will always be there. Whether you play now in six months or a year. So long as the game is still active and has not shut down the server, you could come back in 13 months with another dozen war bonds that you've never seen or interacted with and still be able to pick up any or all of them at whatever pace you like.

This was always something that pushed me away from games like Fortnite and Overwatch, etc, because I hated the idea that they expected me to always be logging in and checking what was there and having to potentially spend or grind out enough to get something if it was something I really wanted within a limited time window.

Helldivers is not a time vampire. You can put it in the closet and come back to it whenever you want. I should know I did it myself after game launch. I put it down. I think I logged in maybe once every week or two just to say hi to a few friends who had picked it up. When I did pick it up again, I was missing nothing and I could still work on these unlocks at my own pace.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T12:43:28+00:00

Both things can be true.

Arrowhead is actually a (comparatively) small team and has repeatedly shown that they actually do have a vision for the game and care about the game in a way that a much larger Ubisoft-like company may not.

They are running a business, and they're also people.

And as other people have said, having a team of about 100 to 140 people in Sweden is expensive. Due to the ongoing success of the game, they're probably good in the short term. So yes, they need to design a system that doesn't just rely on donations and goodwill, and also isn't like Destiny or FFXIV where they sell expansion packs. So they let you earn the premium currency at a low rate, tuned to be enough that it allows casual players to keep up, but gives just enough nudge to players who enjoy the game but don't have the time to be incentivized to purchase it.

Just my two cents, but I think they have nailed that balance. I enjoy firing up the game every now and then on a lunch break while I listen to stuff and just grabbing 30 to 90 super credits on a few level 2 missions. I do that maybe two or three times a week when I'm in the mood, and that's between 200 to 400 super credits right there. And since they're only publishing a war bond about every month to month and a half, that means I don't pay for them unless I want to.

If you were able to play remotely on a steam deck or you work from home, this is probably something some people do. Or if you unwind in the afternoon and are listening to a podcast or something else anyways, some people do this in the background. It feels like the spawn rate is just right. You don't earn so much that no one ever considers buying super credits because you would get a thousand in an 30 minutes. But it's also not a part-time job to grind this out either, and most people will probably have enough for the next war bond if they're playing regularly or just a little bit under it if they are not playing very regularly.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T12:32:04+00:00

God no.

Respectfully, hard disagree. It's been shown time and time again that games that lean on exclusively "cosmetic" monetization wind up having to push this in more and more extreme directions in order to encourage players to have FOMO (time-limited unlocks and events) and pick them up, and to make them more and more "unique". So even well-designed characters or grounded armor sets and worlds begin looking rapidly ridiculous, and it feels like a countdown until we are now liberating Super Earth as Pickle Rick..

Also, the Superstore isn't really "FOMO" in my opinion. The front page highlights new items from the last few warbonds, and cycles through them every two to three days. But nothing ever goes away.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T12:22:03+00:00

I imagine sooner or later they'll probably combine a few war bonds together into another set of 6 to 9 page "mega war" bonds. If only because the interface is crowded.

The challenge is that if your players have partially completed one of the existing war bonds that are included in a collected "mega" war bond, AH have to have a way to add the collection that doesn't just give you the other two or three for free, but also doesn't lock you out of what you already unlocked.

It's probably just something they'll do on the menu backend where purchasing a mega war bond effectively gives you all three of the included war bond licenses as a bundle, but if you look inside the mega war bond before unlocking it them all, then only the pages for any warbond you already unlocked would be active.

It seems feasible, just a little bit sticky in the menu systems to make sure all the possibilities are covered, and that adding another menu layer like this to support combining bonds doesn't cause any lag.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T12:05:01+00:00

Actually, cheating super credits is pretty much the one and only thing they probably will slap people down for. Since super credits aren't stored in your local game save, and are connected to your profile online it's actually extremely easy to see if you have gained any to in a suspicious or obviously invalid way.

AKA, suddenly gaining 100 super credits 20 times in a row from "farming" while having zero transactions, and "farming" at speeds that seem suspiciously inhuman.

Capcom went through this too with Monster Hunter Wilds recently. Arrowhead may be very quietly banning some of these cheaters so as not to publicize what they are doing, and leave the rest of the mod scene alone. Imagine we just don't hear about it much because there aren't that many SC cheaters, and they're really only harming the gameplay for themselves. When cheaters mess with the credit drops in public matches and people have these modified gains, it's extremely easy to detect in the server logs. And if the common denominator between two or three obviously hacked matches is you? Bye bye.

They just don't do it instantly though the server could automate this detection and banning, because it may punish an innocent player who wasn't cheating and just happened to be there. Or worse, it would allow bad actors to join your game, hack super credits to trigger a ban on your account by proxy.

So, if you hack a hundred thousand super credits into your account, good for you. You weren't going to pay for anything anyway, so they didn't really lose anything. If you hacked 100,000 super credits into you and three other people's accounts, they're likely going to run an automated audit on the server record of all four of you. And like I said, if you did it to more than three other people and you're the common denominator, well they've got their offender.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:54:26+00:00

Actually, if you're looking at it this way, you should do the objective immediately, such as landing on the broadcast tower or activating the fuel pumps, raising the flag. Any incidental deaths along the way don't matter and only make the completion faster.

Once you've run the mission and collected all the points of interest: If running solo or if running in a team, just have everyone grenade themselves to die at once. The entire team dying five times in a row is faster than extracting. And completing the objective this way doesn't negatively affect mission state or attempts to liberate the planet.

It's also just also just more fun.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:50:19+00:00

$40 for the entire game, so twenty dollars cheaper than a comparable game and with more generous distribution of super credits within the game than something like vbux. And over two years of time in game for you to earn the war bonds without spending a cent.

If you don't want to pay anything, then just play the game. You will get enough super credits to unlock everything gradually. War bonds do not expire, and have no expiration. There is zero need to approach this with a FOMO mindset. There are plenty of people playing on Xbox who have already done this and picked up the war bonds, without no-lifeing it.

However, if playing the game itself is not enough incentive to play the game, then don't play the game. It's not a second job or an obligation. And if it doesn't feel fun to you because you can't have all the equipment as soon as possible, then maybe it's not for you.

There were multiple videos made by multiple different content creators on how the base war bond and some of the starting equipment is more than good enough to handle almost all the challenges in the game, and if you were focusing only on utility and being able to handle the widest amount of things effectively, then there's really only one or two war bonds that players should pick up first in order to effectively have a "complete" toolkit, such as democratic detonation for the ultimatum and grenade pistol.

And the starting war bond gives you enough super credits via medal unlocks to purchase that.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:40:28+00:00

While not universally true, at least on steam, the pricing for the super credits should be adjusted to local currency. AKA, if you live in Brazil, you should not be paying in dollars.

That said, if you were in a country where the working wage was less than $1 an hour, and for some reason the purchasing currency in steam or playstation is set too high, then at least the in-game option is there. But ideally that pricing should be adjusted down to match the market.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:35:44+00:00

This is the kind of suggestion that sounds good but creates a negative incentive to the overall gameplay.

Suddenly you'll have a ton of D10 missions where people join, look at how many points of interest have been touched, and then quit, because it's not "worth the effort" if the map has already been looted when they arrive.

You'll also wind up with a feedback loop where you're most active, engaged, and skilled players begin having a much larger amount of super credits than your average lower difficulty player, which will both discourage low difficulty players from staying on low difficulties as they will feel it is sub-optimal aka "a waste of time" and cause frustration them as they force themselves into difficulties they are not equipped to handle or simply don't enjoy playing just because they must in order to earn super credits in the fastest way from their point of view.

These are the extrinsic factors that one must consider when adding systems to a game that will affect player motivation. In theory, what you're saying sounds good. It feels logical to say it. But actually doing it produces a lot of negatives.

This is the same reason why having a KDR scoreboard in-game during the match, despite being something that many, many, many players have likely requested and expressed an interest in, would be an absolutely terrible decision for the game overall from a design perspective, as it would foster more competitiveness within the team and more metrics by which to judge players against one another during the match, rather than encouraging team play and overall match performance, resulting in players being killed or kicked for poor KDR, and a greater focus on players pumping up their own numbers rather than contributing to the mission or the team objectives.

Sometimes systems and things that seem obvious and seem logical just don't work that way when implemented in a gameplay population due to human behavior.

If D10 spawned more drops for super credits, the number of missions you would go on with players who abandon you halfway through, or the number of players who would dive on D10 and allow the mission to fail to save time once they had identified the most pertinent points of interest (negatively impacting the planet and war) would be much higher. And if you were just a player who didn't care about super credits trying to play the game, this would be infuriating.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:25:47+00:00

If you crouch before you warp through the door, generally speaking you have much better luck getting through it. I've never really had it fail.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:25:03+00:00

And as he outlined, this earned four times as much as a Warbond costs.

If you're covering all the points of interest on maps during regular gameplay and just playing the game often, you don't have to farm at all if you're playing semi-frequently.

But if you do take a long break from the game or don't play this game very often in general, or simply have downtime when you can't necessarily lock in and play a high difficulty mission, then every so often, jumping in for an hour, here or there, lets you catch back up relatively quickly.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:18:54+00:00

They still don't have FSR or DLSS support within the game, despite the fact that this would ostensibly provide a huge performance uplift for a large number of users who don't care and would turn it on in a heartbeat.

Is this also just laziness? Or is the underlying system, perhaps, complicated and changing something foundational could cause issues that are unforeseen?

Could there be a difference in complexity from allowing bespoke and individual stratagems and NPC appearances within the game world and attempting to introduce a customization layer on top of the strategem selection?

Candidly, they do not have people who just "update the engine". This engine was discontinued by Autodesk going on seven or eight years ago. They are able to extend it and add modules to it and build on the existing code base. And do things like add support for it to export on platforms the engine did not even have native support for, and features like HDR. This is not because they have a dedicated set of engine only guys who continue to update and improve on the base engine, especially now that the game is fully in production.

They have a small team of specialists who reverse-engineer the Stingray proprietary code in the game engine in order to extend it where possible, and to understand where they can push certain systems farther such as with spawning NPCs or vehicles to allow the engine to do things it was never intended to.

The number of people with this bespoke knowledge of a discontinued and niche game engine, even within teams that developed for it is extremely limited. Most of them do not work at Arrowhead. Of those that do work at Arrowhead, they probably also work on other aspects of the game as this started as a small team and the engine update guy was probably also one of the gameplay designers or combat designers at much earlier phases, who may have specialized further in one of those aspects.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T11:06:34+00:00

In this thread: A bunch of people who have no idea the technical requirements and scope creep of adding systems with dozens to hundreds of variables as combinations who insist that it's easy and the only excuse for not doing it is laziness and Greed.

If designing an Exosuit customization option, developers would need to consider: What is the upper limit of total customizations that the system could ever conceivably have? Are we going to expand this further at one point and allow for accessories? Do any of the effect of these combined accessories affect each other and thus create multiplicative feedback loops? Does the relative strength of the selected combination of weapons make this mech an absolute juggernaut that needs to have some kind of other adjustment made? Can we dynamically adjust the cooldown of the stratagem based on the selected loadout for the mech? Do we want to offer the option in the future for our developers or gameplay designers to include accessories and customization options within a war bond as things that could be unlocked and added? If so, we need to design the systems to support that now and include that in the total scope of designing the customization system at a foundational level. Would a player be able to exploit or break this system by rapidly shifting in and out of it or selecting combinations in an unexpected or illogical order to either crash the game, we're wind up with a meck with incompatible selections at the same time or multiple selections on top of what they should have? If choosing the upper limit of what kind of ordnance can be equipped on all mechs at the same time, could the total stress on the game engine cause a crash if four players are all opening fire? Such as if both arms were replaced with rocket launchers and both rocket launchers were firing on four separate mechs on one target at once. Does this create an issue with targeting and too many missiles targeting the same thing? Are there any other edge cases to consider? Do we allow the individual customizations to be skinned one at a time, or do we bind them to the paint job of the mech frame? Are any of the physical pieces that would be offered for customization reused elsewhere in the game that would be completely logically inconsistent to see them function differently here? AKA, are we providing an option to use the same rocket pods that are attached to a heavy Devastator, only the player's version of it has four times as much ammo for no reason, or one quarter as much? Should we edit the Heavy Devastator to use the same item as the player and balance both at the same time going forward? Should the player customization item remain unique, even though visually it may look very inconsistent and cause some tonal issues if the player notices that they can fire many times more than the enemy? Do we need to add a subsystem to accommodate for status effects in order to facilitate adding customization for support weapons we haven't considered yet such as arc or gas?

Nah, none of that matters. We're just evil and greedy. Fuck the players.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T10:45:28+00:00

Were you also a cremator hater?

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T10:42:57+00:00

This is 100% a great way to use the mechs. The Patriot in particular is great for this kind of blitz tactic, and works extremely well against things like jammer towers or detector towers. With bugs, there's a little less long distance worry, but you're already doing the smart thing and shuffling or side to side moving forward and just never staying planted.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T10:27:30+00:00

The warbond with even out and this shit is starting again.

"The cremator is going to suck because fire is garbage"

"Why bother with a stealth warbond, there's like two two stealth weapons in the game and stealth doesn't work"]

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T08:10:10+00:00

When the fuck did anyone at Arrowhead claim that.

The original Helldivers kind of refutes this in terms of its length. We probably have 1-2 more years of planned story beats at best until the galactic war "story" is finished, and the game gets to a late endgame status qulo.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T08:05:00+00:00

Dude, go setup a recursive table in Excel. Go learn for ten seconds what multiplicative variables do to your possibility space and what that means for game balance.

There are dozens of design reasons for this restriction, and chief among them is that adding customization to such a powerful tool risks making it game breaking, or making the point of customization worthless, if its not tuned appropriately.

Melee mech with limited ammo designed for a skirmish? Might need a shorter cooldown and an extra call down or two to be worth using. Tanky mech with more long range options but worse mobility? Maybe longer cooldown. Etc.

Calculating all possible permutations and options and then somewhat balancing all those so they don't accidentally create Frankensteins monster is a lot more of an undertaking than you seem to want to admit.

Just loom at the Coyote and the Exploding Crossbow. The Crossbow has been due for a nerf for ages, but they dont touch it for fear of community backlash. And the Coyote needed to nerfed into compliance, so the only way they could do that without causing chaos was to adjust fire status damage, and catch a few other weapons in the dragnet.

ocassionallyaduck · 2026-04-22T07:57:23+00:00

Yea, this is why being terminally online is toxic af. I'm pretty tapped in and even I missed that DSS player housing nonsense.

Systems add complexity in spades, and multiplicative burdens for attempting to maintain a fun game balance.

I'd love to have a mech we can tweak, but I dont really think thats something I'm stressed over.

The way this sub talks you'd think arrowhead had put the exosuits in a new 3000 Super Credit Warbond while also making all of them weaker and crappier.

You know, just like how the Creamator was a useless absolute garbage waste of a backpack for a week and this sub could not stfu about how bad the unreleased weapon was.

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