Just as Helldivers 2 was engaged in the liberation war of the Tianguan planet, the Swedish game team Arrowhead Games caused a war of words among players on overseas forums and Discord channels. As the discussion became more and more intense, the studio CEO Johan Pilestedt personally apologized to players.
“Battlefield 2” will receive a balance update on March 6 (Minor Patch 01.000.100), which mainly brings about the environmental variables of “Meteor Storm”, weakens the previously powerful mainstream shotguns “Breaker” and “Strafing Breaker”, reduces their ammunition capacity, and lowers the safety mode of the strategic support weapon “Railgun” The heavy armor penetration effect below.
The biggest impact is that players who previously used the railgun as their main weapon found that they could no longer easily penetrate the hard shell of the charging bug in safe mode. They had to press R to switch to unsafe mode to charge it to Only when fired just before the overload explosion can the heavy armor penetration effect be achieved.
In fact, the railgun of “Bad Soldier 2” has indeed become the “mainstream” (Meta) currently recognized by the player community, because it is unlike other “machine guns”, “spear”, “recoilless rifle”, etc. The ultra-high-power weapon requires an extra ammunition to be carried, which allows the player to carry an extra protective backpack on the back. In addition, the railgun can still break the hard armor of the charging bug when it is fully charged in the previous safe mode.
After the balance update, the Arrowhead team has also enhanced other weapons. The most obvious one is that the damage of the “Flame Thrower” has been greatly improved, and it has even become the best weapon for killing charging bugs.
Flamethrower can kill chargers quite fast now #Helldivers2 pic.twitter.com/dm7cYN02S9
— Helldivers Alerts (@HelldiversAlert) March 6, 2024
However, this balance update triggeredMany overseas players are dissatisfiedthe main opinions are that they don’t understand why the Arrowhead team wants to “weaken the fun of players.” Obviously, it has been affected by other games in recent years, and most players are dissatisfied with the weakening of the strong gameplay they are used to.
However, Arrowhead game designer Alex Kravchenko said, “Our goal is to provide everyone with a wide range of weapon choices… Of course, you should have your own favorite weapon, but it should come from your personal preference, not from what is generally accepted. Planting guns is the strongest view.”
Although the balance weakening is good for “Battlefield 2” in the long run, in the end rational discussions were gradually replaced by emotions, and some official Arrowhead members accidentally responded to players in a joking tone, which became a war of words in the community discussion.
For example, the Discord administrator’s message “Seeing you all crying makes me so happy”, or official staff Fredrik_E’s response mentioning “technical issues”, all aroused players’ dissatisfaction and criticism, even if Fredrik_E apologize afterwardsI felt that the joke was a bit too much, and as a developer, I was actually in an unfair position, but it seemed that I was not forgiven.
Comment
byu/cryptic-fox from discussion
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Moderator of the official Helldivers discord adding more fuel to the flame.
byu/Curious_Influence185 inHelldivers
In the end, Arrowhead Studio CEO Pilestedt responded to the Reddit community, stating that “these remarks were not the studio’s intention.”
“As I am personally an active member of the studio, I always encourage developers to interact with the community,” Pilestedt said. “However, this also puts us at risk of being misunderstood or getting into heated debates, which is why we Improvements are being actively discussed within the studio. While I understand these comments reflect on the entire studio, that was not our intention.”
Pilestedt emphasized that in response to the response to this balance update, they will collect feedback from players as much as possible and take the opinions of the player community into consideration in future discussions.
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byand/Jiggaboy95 from discussion
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Of course, there are good and bad balance updates, but currently another focus of the player community is whether “Battlefield 2” needs to chase the “mainstream”.
One group of people hopes to collect super medals as soon as possible, so they need more efficient weapons to conquer the missions with difficulty levels 7 to 9; the other group of people believe that “Battlefield 2” is inherently a joyful PvE cooperative game, and even if it is weakened, it will still be better. Enhanced, it’s not a bad time to play with another weapon.
In any case, the active discussion proves that “Battlefield 2” is still popular overseas. With the addition of future warfare vehicles and new content, Arrowhead will be busy for a while.
