Helldivers 2 Faces Major Issues Six Months Post-Launch

• Helldivers 2 launched in February with great success.
• Initial price was $40, lower than the industry standard.
• Gameplay involved battling alien species and robots.
• Frequent updates caused community backlash.
• PSN login drama significantly impacted the game's community.

Helldivers 2: Six Months Later

By Moises Taveras

Published: Friday 9:15 AM

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.

However, the past few months have been marred by controversy and upheaval that has hurt the game and the reputation of 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.

Initial Success

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.

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.

Gameplay Experience

At first, you could only face off against the Terminids, a bug-like alien species that descend on players in overwhelming numbers.

Soon enough, 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, rendering momentous experiences from the chaos that ensued.

That was the real thing that sold Helldivers 2 to so many people—it seemed to love the mess.

The game itself ultimately proved to be a little too glitchy for its own good, but at the outset, it valued this sense of incongruity and wrongness and even spun it into a fun aspect of the game.

Challenges and Controversies

Before long, 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.

Community Backlash

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.

Current State

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.

Conclusion

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.