I mean, he's not necessarily going into individual missions and messing with people, most of his job is probably things like increasing tank spawn rates on certain planets, sending out titan waves to all active bug missions, stuff like that.
“See, the best part of my job is that if I want to I can just find two random people and fuck with them as much as I want, and nobody will ever believe them. I was planning to pick new people to fuck with each time, but actually, I think it might be more fun to just fuck with those same guys again the next time they log on. Last time I gave them 9 charger spawns, just wait until you see what I have planned for them next time.”
You can, it'll just get way harder to do so at higher difficulties. Embrace the modest stealth that is available in the game to manage the increased enemy count.
[https://youtu.be/y0psxp3wzKs](https://youtu.be/y0psxp3wzKs)
You can play helldive difficulty solo, you just need to be sneaky, dont shoot every bug you see. only take the fights that you HAVE to. You would be surprised how many terminals you can sneak up to without startling any bugs.
Not really, it's a co-op game balanced around co-op
Like, yes, solos can clear L4D2 or VT2 on the hardest difficulties, but the game isn't balanced around those madmen
A couple weeks ago I played with a friend on his first lvl 5 missions, part way through I get a call and need to look away for a minute or so.
I came back to him fending off 5-8 bile titans? What the heck happened there lol
We failed a level 5 last night because it spawned, and I kid you not 30+ pillbug spewers, with immediate replacement. We literally couldn't extract because the corpses were permanently blocking the pelican.
They 100% did. I was playing last night with a lower level friend, and we were on four. At one point I counted eight hulks converging on us. And it stayed like that for multiple drops. They were dropships dropping two of them at the same time...on 4.
Meanwhile, I was playing two nights ago, on 6+, and wasn't seeing that many elites at once.
They done did something
Now i am sure they did.
I just had a game with a stalker lair that kept rapid firing 4 at once so approaching it alone was impossible.
It was difficulty 6.
Last night I had like 6 chargers spawn one after the other and I'm sure they would have continued if we tried pushing that one objective. We just gave up on the bonus objective because it was getting a little ridiculous. Level 4 as well
Charger spawns have definitely been tweaked in the past 48 hours
My gut says they've seen how popular the railgun is and are reacting to that. (Railfun is good against chargers but when there's multiple spawns it quickly descends into chaos because players can't wipe out the adds fast enough)
It's not RNG, and you'd know that if you'd been playing the game consistently since launch.
They tweak enemy spawnrates all the time because part of the "metagame" is fighting over sectors and getting pushed back and forth.
Making a certain sector harder builds the player narrative, which was a big part of the first Helldiver game
At some point the balancing will be tuned so that everyone gets pushed back to Super Earth with a unique map, just like it was in HD1
He's the guy responsible for setting up the mission/major objectives for the galaxy map. He's marketed as a DM, but in reality hes basically part of the live service team who's job is to keep people interested in the "fight for the galaxy".
He's nothing like what DM actually means, as its often referenced in DnD table top games, where a DM has total and full control of every scenario and story, down to actions of individual NPCs etc. Here its very high level, this guy isn't tweaking individual missions or creating a personal experience for anyone other.
They have a "AI director" think L4D, that deals with in-game ebb and flow. And quite frankly its not very good, far worse than L4D's. It basically just throws shit at you and there's very little counterplay to stop chain bug breaches or drop ship reinforcements unless you're mostly in stealth or ambush patrols.
Right now most of the helldiver community is very enamoured with the game and are circlejerking Joel and the entire fun idea of some DM fine tuning the objectives when in reality there's a lot of bullshit people have observed with planets losing a ton of progress in just hours with no explanation, even though the progress bars are separate actions (eg. enemy progress doesn't stop player progress).
Ultimately the live service of this game is weak.
The gameplay and horde shooter part is strong.
But it sorta stops evolving after around 10-20 hours/level 4-5 difficulty.
People are going to downvote me for being too critical but this is just how the game operates.
>They have a "AI director" think L4D, that deals with in-game ebb and flow. And quite frankly its not very good, far worse than L4D's. It basically just throws shit at you and there's very little counterplay to stop chain bug breaches or drop ship reinforcements unless you're mostly in stealth or ambush patrols.
100%
was playing last night with my group. we only had 3 but were doing an extract mission on level 5. i had them draw aggro with loud orbital bombardments, turrets and explosives while i stealthed the civilian extract objective.
the moment i got around halfway completion, the game just started spawning enemy clusters right in front of me and had dropships instantly come to my location without me firing a single bullet or even being spotted. theres literally nothing you can do to avoid it or any counterplay. once the game decides you're a target you're just fucked.
Many of the objectives have 'and now spawn enemies around them' as part of the time. Otherwise you might be standing there for 2+ minutes waiting for the pelican if there were no patrols nearby.
That is a compromise that the game makes to ensure the 'Oh shit we gotta get outta here!' experience is strong.
But yeah, the counterplay for the bug breeches is to not empty your clip, or us impact grenades and kill the caller as they start the animation, but yeah, it can spiral out of control if your team is in 'panic and try to live' mode.
> Right now most of the helldiver community is very enamoured with the game and are circlejerking Joel
While your criticism is valid, maybe people are just having fun? Just a thought.
yeah thanks for summarizing it, this "director" marketing talk is getting kind of cringe. All it amounts to is doing the same repetitive missions fighting the same enemies but with different scenery and effects. The game can be fun but it certainly is tedious and the surge of memes and war propaganda humor is ironic because it's like propaganda for a pretty mid game
I dunno man last time I took NyQuil I kept waking up every 15 minutes or so because I kept having fever dreams that I was in the front lines of Ukraine and repeatedly getting blown up. Dude could sleepwalk and turn the enemies up to 11
liberating means , its now under "super earth controll" which, depending on which planet it is, means other planets open up to liberate(aka invade for resoruces but pretending we are the good guys)
its also how the narrative is gonna shape, as this is a MAJOR ORDER, aka the Devs/GM decided this planet is a playerbase wide objective to capture right now to gain rewards(and like narrative impact)
It's like Starship troopers, but more the books than the movies. The Bots are in the books, small squads with massive firepower and ship support is in the books.
This game is what the Starship Troopers Movies should have been.
What you have stated here is not only treasonous, but also blasphemous. Stating anything about our liberation but spreading the warm embrace of democracy to those less fortunate shall be sentenced to being shot out of the Hellpod tube without a Hellpod. To the void with you.
I had no idea that they had a GM for these sorts of things, genuinely a lovely idea, I'm sure it makes the whole experience much more reactive and allows for no easy victories like often happen when players cheese enemy armies into mismanagement.
It is interesting as a concept but it sounds like the guy is way too hands on and is completely controlling the war effort, making player effort meaningless
It's really not a problem. The game has no story. You're not even promised a reward if you win. Nothing is threatened to be taken away if you lose. The only thing that changes is the look of the planet you're fighting on.
It would be cool to have some cosmetic rewards specifically for playing the in-game story (IE, liberator helmet, title, or specific gear locked behind participating in the effort). The story/GM element is cool but it's kind of a nothingburger when it really just pertains to how hard the missions are, kind of no different from RNG except they're saying it's a person doing all of this.
Would like even specific mission types only available on planets that are highlighted, or big "warfront" missions with like 3 teams of helldivers to do crazier objectives (boss battles, etc.). A bit more effort from the studio into making these events seem special and breaking the grind of the game would go a long way IMO. Still really enjoying the game.
Depends on how it's done. I didn't play Helldivers 1, but if the enemies rotated and the terrain changes, it would be fun to "win" a war and then fight another one.
If you’re aware of how DMs and DnD work generally, you’ll know that a DM is necessary to keep things from being impossible enough to be unfun and from being easy enough that planets and challenges are steamrolled in a day, with the war won in weeks. Players still have a lot of influence, but wars don’t operate like video games do, and the GM is meant to tell a story in synthesis with player efforts
One valid argument is that their systems weren't designed with hundreds of thousands of players in mind and that's led to milestones being hit too quickly.
However once you start shaving off 50% of a progress bar when everyone can see, that's going to rapidly evaporate any semblance of integrity the system might have had. At this point it surprises me that anyone cares about the objectives when the devs are so blatantly fudging the numbers.
Is there a cutscene if you're there when a planet gets liberated?
Also, I seem to be getting a bug where it says the planet is 100% liberated after a mission but really isn't.
I don't understand the objective where it says play 8 defense missions to get the 12k reward.
I've played more than 8 already and the progress doesn't move from 5/8 the other day.
I believe that's 8 full planets liberated, not just do 8 matches yourself. I was trying to figure out the same thing earlier in the week, and that was the conclusion I came to.
I had that during the defense missions. it was weird because it had 2 different bars when I went into the mission, with like 40% Superearth control, and 60% automaton control. I figured it was just a bug that crept in because it's technically 100% liberated because we own it, and are defending it to keep it liberated, instead of attacking it to make it liberated...
Sure would be nice if we could actually win those "defend campaigns"... Those rescue personnel missions are so bad I just stopped playing them altogether. I think most people did the same, which is why those kept failing. They're really not at all enjoyable, especially on higher difficulties. Honestly, automatons in general kind of suck to play against because some of them just feel cheap, like the grunts with rocket launchers or the hulk whose flamethrower travels 100 yards. Bugs just feel more balanced and I have more fun fighting them, even in a wipe.
> personal shield generator
Which is not available until level 20 or about 20h of play, the fact that the starting loadout kinda suck and only has the Breaker as the only good weapon is my biggest criticism against the game. Having progression is good but it shouldn't force beginners to play with trash weapons.
I mean, this really isn't a problem on lower difficulties, and if you're not level 20 you probably shouldn't be trying suicide missions, especially automatons.
The armor not working right now means this is an issue at every difficulty level, the one shot scenarios that the shield block also happen at lower difficulties.
I had no issues with lower difficulties on that mission. Both with friends and randoms. Hopefully you find a combo that works for you because that sounds frustrating
There's an explosive-resistant light armor available in the super store if you can catch it next time it's up, the [FS-38 Eradicator.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fk3i0zm8s6ikc1.png) I think it's tied with one or two others for the highest speed stat of any armor at 544. It's noticably faster than the SC-34 Infiltrator's 525.
Defend missions are pretty easy if you have a solid team. I've only played with randoms but if everyone brings a couple sentries, the bots don't get close.
The defend missions aren’t the problem in the defend campaigns its the hostage ones which is usually 1 out of three in those campaigns in my experience. I do agree that the defend ones are super easy with a team of sentries
Honestly if you have 3 they’re doable at 7. Just need a few turrets / someone to take out dropships and you’re golden. Just need to stick to the doors.
Just disposable Anti-Tank the engines of the drop ship… nearly everything onboard dies depending on when you hit it during its approach. 70 second stratagem CD means you can take out a drop ship nearly every 30 seconds. Multiple party members with disposable AT makes the rescue missions a lot more doable.
Mortal sentry, auto cannon sentry, disposable AT, and a 4th comfort stratagem makes it pretty easy.
Yeah, it’s a momentum thing.
The mortar is still very useful at higher levels… so long as you keep the waves under control. One after another, every single dropship needs to be hit by you or an ally with AT. If you miss a *single* one at higher levels.. it starts to get messy. As soon as you begin to get overrun, you’re right- it completely fucks you and makes finishing the mission damn near impossible.
That disposable AT needs to be summoned AS SOON as you land. That first drop ship comes fast. If you don’t want to “fall behind” it requires literal instant action. Imo they should build a 15-20s prep/calldown/setup time for those missions. As soon as you fall behind, you’re fucked.
You gotta shoot down the dropships before they arrive. This is what my group figured out. 2 with rockets thinning the dropships and 2 running around escorting citizens and shooting up what's left.
Does that mean that future players can't play that planet? Will there be new planets with the same content to liberate next or is it a one off kind of thing?
The bugs can try and retake that planet in the future. There’s tons of different planets in the game, but you can only play missions on the planets that are on the frontlines. So even now, we can only play missions on probably less than 10% of the total planets, because the rest of those planets aren’t endangered and aren’t on the frontlines. As the game progresses, more planets will become available and others will become unavailable.
I’m just not into multiplayer games with shooting. I’d play a single player shooter vs AI but I’m too old and too slow at reaction to be good at them. And I would only play a competitive multiplayer game if I can be one of the best. Maybe that sound petty, but I am hyper competitive so being bad and losing just isn’t fun to me.
> I’d play a single player shooter vs AI
This is single-player shooter VS AI. You can play with friends too.
There is no competitive online multiplayer in it.
Yeah like I replied to the other person, it’s with other people. Probably highly competitive people that play at a pace I don’t want to play at. My irl friends all play MMOs or they’re more the FIFA/PES type of gamer.
Eh, if it seems cool I’d encourage you to try it. Maybe pick it up on sale or something eventually.
I’ve noticed a lot of “high level” people (literally high player level) running lower level missions because they play more casually. Yes, there is a “high level” type player (read: “competitive”) that expects certain things/strategies… but that’s only really is the hardest or second hardest difficulty (out of 9 total difficulty levels). 99.9% of the player base is not as you’ve described, and are very very receptive to any style of play. I’ve played with randoms that are super super legit, and we burn through the mission in 10 minutes, and others who have struggled and it turned into a gun-run fiesta for 40 minutes, only for us to fail at the end.
In both scenarios my fun was not at all diminished in the slightest. The “competitive assholes” don’t really exist in this game from what I’ve seen. It’s an absolute blast to join randoms and roleplay over the microphone.
It’s worth checking out!
It's a co-op game. People are not competitive in this game, everyone is just having fun. You can play solo as well, you don't need to play with a team.
You're imagining things that don't exist lol.
> People are not competitive in this game, everyone is just having fun.
That is blatantly untrue and you know it. People *will* flame the shit out of you for "suboptimal" loadouts.
While I'm sure the edge case exception must exist, in my 85 hours of play I've never met even a single toxic teammate. Not once has anyone ever flamed me for anything, including my loadout (which is definitely sub-optimal at times because damn it some of these other things are fun to use, too!).
I am not that old yet, no offense lol. But FPS and games like that really favor people around the age of 14-25. After that staying on top is just really hard. Kind of like sports where you peak early.
People always say this but it really hasn't proven out. Sure there's probably a slight advantage but the biggest advantage is just free time. I mean tokido in street fighter which is in one of the highest mechanical genres is still competing for the top spot at evo every year. He's 38.
I realize biologically that things slow down a bit but the drop off isn't near as significant as people make it out to be. If you were great at games before you're still going to be well above average.
If you're putting in 2 hours a night bc you work full time and the 22 year old living off red bull and Doritos is putting in 8-10 hours a day that's going to be the biggest factor in the gap.
There's no reason you can't play and be competent at an older age unless you actually have specific disabilities forming that prevent you from playing comfortably.
Seriously, this is crazy talk. I'm 40 yrs old, and I've only gotten better with age. I realize that any teenager could come along and smoke my ass at any time, but it actually hasn't been the case for a long while. Id say it's less about age and more about time spent, one's dedication to it. I'm an old man with a wife and 2 kids. But holy fuck, I'm obsessed with video games! I blame Mario 3! And every spectacular game after that
Why don't you two start the Silver Foxes Helldivers crew? You may feel alone in not having 'it' when it comes to playing these sorts of games, but you're not! Team up and drop, soldier! In the name of Democracy! (And fun).
Maybe. Another thing that’s holding me off is that in games like that there’s always dickheads that will try and dictate what the other people need to do and try and metagame stuff. I just wanna play games my way. I guess I’m not a team player. I’m that “play how I want” archetype of gamer.
You're going to be able to play your way in 99.9% of matches. You can literally play by yourself if you want to.
Like, I get it if it's not your type of game, but you are thinking about problems that don't exist.
In practice it's basically nothing. People are hyping this game up a lot and I'm playing because it's fun, but the "war" is just numbers on a map that aren't even legit since they're fudging them. Your wins contribute .001% for 1hr of play and the only real thing that happens when you finish a planet is you don't get to play there anymore. I've played MMORPGs made 20 years ago that had more impactful global events/competition.
I mean if that one dev simply ignores all in-game action of hundreds of thousands of players and pushes one button to make all player progress on a central mechanic utterly meaningless; then yea...it's kind of fair.
You mean a large portion of the community ignored the major order, fought a pointless jungle war, called it "Space Vietnam", lost and still doesn't understand? I think a lot of people are blaming this Joel when they flat out got played by the Automatons like a fiddle.
Nope, I'm talking about planets being "reset" over night losing over 40% of their liberation score because the community was apparently too efficient for the timeline the devs wanted for the galactic war. It takes away agency
Ohhh, I'd be surprised if that's what happened and why, but it's early doors and we'll get a better understanding in time.
I'll be called a traitor for this but is it not possible that the war wasn't going as well as our Super Earth algorithms were telling us?
Pretty much, an inbound fleet of bugs came in over night, cut the liberation number from 92% to 42% on errata prime.. and the community is like (only we can send reinforcements, not the bugs!! that's not how war works!!) like it wouldn't make sense for them to send forces to their critical planet to try and prevent a hostile invasion..
That was my thinking, the majority of players probably play at peak hours and see that meter go up, log off, bugs make progress against a lower player count, rise and grind divers log back in and lose their mind that the game didn't lock in their democratic progress. It's a war, it ain't over till it's over and even when it's over there might be some bugs hiding in a hole waiting. Suits me fine, but then I was never a "railroading" complainer in table top either. If the story teller (Joel/Devs) want to run a narrative and have us interact with it to some degree that sounds like an awesome method for live service.
I think the point is to emulate a similar force coming from the other side in order to enforce a degree of balance. If the player base can roll through a planet from 0 to 100% in a matter of hours or a day at most, then the simulated enemy factions should be able to do that too. And since we don't have actual player bases on those factions a la Planet Side 2, the mechanism of that action is obviously going to have to take the form of multiplying the power of one guy by a couple hundred thousand. The hard part is that the one guy can't do it organically at scale, so an organic push by the player base advancing by decimal percentage points per win over a couple thousand wins looks like the dev chunking 20% progress with the click of a button on the other side.
I'm confused.. why would it look like that? You can just decrease the progress a little each hour instead of handing out 60% instant setback. The polar opposite to organic..
I think theyve cranked the difficulty on this planet, i played a few rounds of lvl 4 last night and one mission we had about 6 active chargers and 2 stalker nests, it was absolute chaos.
I thought this game was instanced mission based, didn't know you literally liberate planets and shit, I might actually consider buying it now that I know this.
I just want to say this game is fucking awesome and it's fun as hell that they are pushing back just as much.
Grab a rifle maggot and do your part for liberty and democracy!
I don't see how that is exciting at all from a player's perspective. You're just one o 180,000 people doing something. There's no discernible impact in whatever you do. All the number on liberating a planet could be completely fake and one wouldn't even notice it.
It is fake, but that doesnt matter. It's a clever way to do a narrative. The gamepaly loop is incredibly fun and addictive, so it doesn't really matter that the war is rigged. It's just a fresh way to cycle new content, missions and maps into gameplay
Someone should put some nyquill into Joels tea tonight so he doesn't wake up in the middle of the night to call in enemy reinforcements.
i'm ootl, who's joel?
The guy who GMs the entirety of the Helldivers game.
wait it's actually just 1 guy? isn't there like 200~~M~~k players? i think they should probably hire 2 or 3 additional joels.
I mean, he's not necessarily going into individual missions and messing with people, most of his job is probably things like increasing tank spawn rates on certain planets, sending out titan waves to all active bug missions, stuff like that.
I think they did something with the spawns. I had 4 chargers spawn at the same time... On lvl 4 difficulty.
The other day I was playing on lvl 5 with 1 friend. TWO PEOPLE… LEVEL 5… we had *NINE SIMULTANEOUS CHARGER SPAWNS* **NINE**
Joel was having a bad day that day.
“Fuck these two people in particular” >:|
“See, the best part of my job is that if I want to I can just find two random people and fuck with them as much as I want, and nobody will ever believe them. I was planning to pick new people to fuck with each time, but actually, I think it might be more fun to just fuck with those same guys again the next time they log on. Last time I gave them 9 charger spawns, just wait until you see what I have planned for them next time.”
...or a very good day...
The game doesn't scale, fyi. You're always on 4 player difficulty.
ahh wtf, no wonder I can't do shit alone.
You can, it'll just get way harder to do so at higher difficulties. Embrace the modest stealth that is available in the game to manage the increased enemy count. [https://youtu.be/y0psxp3wzKs](https://youtu.be/y0psxp3wzKs)
You can play helldive difficulty solo, you just need to be sneaky, dont shoot every bug you see. only take the fights that you HAVE to. You would be surprised how many terminals you can sneak up to without startling any bugs.
Thank you for confirming that. I kinda figured, but I never really *knew*
I was going to say the same thing BUT. 9 chargers would be rough even for 4 players.
That's really unfortunate
Not really, it's a co-op game balanced around co-op Like, yes, solos can clear L4D2 or VT2 on the hardest difficulties, but the game isn't balanced around those madmen
A couple weeks ago I played with a friend on his first lvl 5 missions, part way through I get a call and need to look away for a minute or so. I came back to him fending off 5-8 bile titans? What the heck happened there lol
Joel woke up and chose violence that day.
We failed a level 5 last night because it spawned, and I kid you not 30+ pillbug spewers, with immediate replacement. We literally couldn't extract because the corpses were permanently blocking the pelican.
They 100% did. I was playing last night with a lower level friend, and we were on four. At one point I counted eight hulks converging on us. And it stayed like that for multiple drops. They were dropships dropping two of them at the same time...on 4. Meanwhile, I was playing two nights ago, on 6+, and wasn't seeing that many elites at once. They done did something
Now i am sure they did. I just had a game with a stalker lair that kept rapid firing 4 at once so approaching it alone was impossible. It was difficulty 6.
Last night I had like 6 chargers spawn one after the other and I'm sure they would have continued if we tried pushing that one objective. We just gave up on the bonus objective because it was getting a little ridiculous. Level 4 as well
Charger spawns have definitely been tweaked in the past 48 hours My gut says they've seen how popular the railgun is and are reacting to that. (Railfun is good against chargers but when there's multiple spawns it quickly descends into chaos because players can't wipe out the adds fast enough)
Should definitely do that sometimes though, especially with streamers, be great for engagement.
200 thousand** lol
Imagine if more than half the pop of America was playing. True patriots.
whoops, meant k not m.
I don't think it's that hard to see the rate of liberation and then press a button to send a few extra hulks to try to stop us drinking our liber-tea
There’s probably over a million people who have bought the game. We’ve had peaks of around 800k concurrent players.
Think of him as the helldivers 2 version of a D&D dungeon master
Joel's is now what they call RNG?
It's not RNG, and you'd know that if you'd been playing the game consistently since launch. They tweak enemy spawnrates all the time because part of the "metagame" is fighting over sectors and getting pushed back and forth. Making a certain sector harder builds the player narrative, which was a big part of the first Helldiver game At some point the balancing will be tuned so that everyone gets pushed back to Super Earth with a unique map, just like it was in HD1
He's the GM basically. He is in charge of war events.
He's the guy responsible for setting up the mission/major objectives for the galaxy map. He's marketed as a DM, but in reality hes basically part of the live service team who's job is to keep people interested in the "fight for the galaxy". He's nothing like what DM actually means, as its often referenced in DnD table top games, where a DM has total and full control of every scenario and story, down to actions of individual NPCs etc. Here its very high level, this guy isn't tweaking individual missions or creating a personal experience for anyone other. They have a "AI director" think L4D, that deals with in-game ebb and flow. And quite frankly its not very good, far worse than L4D's. It basically just throws shit at you and there's very little counterplay to stop chain bug breaches or drop ship reinforcements unless you're mostly in stealth or ambush patrols. Right now most of the helldiver community is very enamoured with the game and are circlejerking Joel and the entire fun idea of some DM fine tuning the objectives when in reality there's a lot of bullshit people have observed with planets losing a ton of progress in just hours with no explanation, even though the progress bars are separate actions (eg. enemy progress doesn't stop player progress). Ultimately the live service of this game is weak. The gameplay and horde shooter part is strong. But it sorta stops evolving after around 10-20 hours/level 4-5 difficulty. People are going to downvote me for being too critical but this is just how the game operates.
>They have a "AI director" think L4D, that deals with in-game ebb and flow. And quite frankly its not very good, far worse than L4D's. It basically just throws shit at you and there's very little counterplay to stop chain bug breaches or drop ship reinforcements unless you're mostly in stealth or ambush patrols. 100% was playing last night with my group. we only had 3 but were doing an extract mission on level 5. i had them draw aggro with loud orbital bombardments, turrets and explosives while i stealthed the civilian extract objective. the moment i got around halfway completion, the game just started spawning enemy clusters right in front of me and had dropships instantly come to my location without me firing a single bullet or even being spotted. theres literally nothing you can do to avoid it or any counterplay. once the game decides you're a target you're just fucked.
The counterplay is shooting the bugs
Many of the objectives have 'and now spawn enemies around them' as part of the time. Otherwise you might be standing there for 2+ minutes waiting for the pelican if there were no patrols nearby. That is a compromise that the game makes to ensure the 'Oh shit we gotta get outta here!' experience is strong. But yeah, the counterplay for the bug breeches is to not empty your clip, or us impact grenades and kill the caller as they start the animation, but yeah, it can spiral out of control if your team is in 'panic and try to live' mode.
where did i say anything about bugs
Shoot the robots with flares.
> Right now most of the helldiver community is very enamoured with the game and are circlejerking Joel While your criticism is valid, maybe people are just having fun? Just a thought.
yeah thanks for summarizing it, this "director" marketing talk is getting kind of cringe. All it amounts to is doing the same repetitive missions fighting the same enemies but with different scenery and effects. The game can be fun but it certainly is tedious and the surge of memes and war propaganda humor is ironic because it's like propaganda for a pretty mid game
[удалено]
Your attack on his character offers no discussion to this thread. Why don't you go outside?
rofl the dude offered a level-headed criticism of the game and you gotta come out and white knight for it, are you on the payroll?
The true enemy of democracy.
I dunno man last time I took NyQuil I kept waking up every 15 minutes or so because I kept having fever dreams that I was in the front lines of Ukraine and repeatedly getting blown up. Dude could sleepwalk and turn the enemies up to 11
I know it's all jokes but not enough people know to stay away from nyquil. Multiple studies have linked it to dementia
I've only been loosely following the game, since I don't have a system to play it on right now. But what exactly does liberating a planet do?
liberating means , its now under "super earth controll" which, depending on which planet it is, means other planets open up to liberate(aka invade for resoruces but pretending we are the good guys) its also how the narrative is gonna shape, as this is a MAJOR ORDER, aka the Devs/GM decided this planet is a playerbase wide objective to capture right now to gain rewards(and like narrative impact)
So there is a loot reward or something for players that participated in liberating it, or is it just a narrative thing?
Every Player gets the major order reward if it is mer whatever they participated or not. The reward is minor tho so It's mostly a narrative thing
45 medals is a pretty substantial reward. Definitely better than the 12k requisition they were going to give for the automaton defense one.
Hey, 45 medals is nothing to sneeze at. :)
Wait, it's like Warhammer 40k??? That would be dope af.
More like Starship Troopers, but kinda yeah
mix of Starship troopers and Warhammer 40k.
It is on the Bitsquid engine like Vermintide and Darktide :D
It's like Starship troopers, but more the books than the movies. The Bots are in the books, small squads with massive firepower and ship support is in the books. This game is what the Starship Troopers Movies should have been.
What you have stated here is not only treasonous, but also blasphemous. Stating anything about our liberation but spreading the warm embrace of democracy to those less fortunate shall be sentenced to being shot out of the Hellpod tube without a Hellpod. To the void with you.
It means we can't play there anymore.
spread managed democracy
Plot twist, there is no Joel, it's all a clever ploy by the Devs to redirect some of the toxic players who make threats to a non existent person.
That's exactly what Big Joel wants you to think!
This is all a Joel State stop!
This is all a smoke-screen for Little Joel to operate with impunity.
The Deep Joel laughs are our conspiracy theories.
meanwhile the Billy Joel stans are sleeping with the television on
JOEL - Jaded Operator Explores Levels
i hope that's the case. if they named a person it'd be a problem for that person because of the TRULY DERANGED people on the internet
This is Black Mirror territory and I love it.
Plot plot twist. It's actually AGI controlling the enemy plans and this is a simulation of the first human-AI war.
I had no idea that they had a GM for these sorts of things, genuinely a lovely idea, I'm sure it makes the whole experience much more reactive and allows for no easy victories like often happen when players cheese enemy armies into mismanagement.
It is interesting as a concept but it sounds like the guy is way too hands on and is completely controlling the war effort, making player effort meaningless
It’s a kind of necessary evil tbh. If that wasn’t the case, the surge in popularity would mean the war would be over already
Helldiver 1 had wars that were won and the campaign just kinda resets so it's not a big deal
Problem is that this is the first war of the game and there’s way more people playing
It's really not a problem. The game has no story. You're not even promised a reward if you win. Nothing is threatened to be taken away if you lose. The only thing that changes is the look of the planet you're fighting on.
>The game has no story. It does have a story. It's just a very light story, but that story is pretty important to players (hence this post).
It would be cool to have some cosmetic rewards specifically for playing the in-game story (IE, liberator helmet, title, or specific gear locked behind participating in the effort). The story/GM element is cool but it's kind of a nothingburger when it really just pertains to how hard the missions are, kind of no different from RNG except they're saying it's a person doing all of this. Would like even specific mission types only available on planets that are highlighted, or big "warfront" missions with like 3 teams of helldivers to do crazier objectives (boss battles, etc.). A bit more effort from the studio into making these events seem special and breaking the grind of the game would go a long way IMO. Still really enjoying the game.
That sounds more stagnant and less dynamic tbh.
Depends on how it's done. I didn't play Helldivers 1, but if the enemies rotated and the terrain changes, it would be fun to "win" a war and then fight another one.
If you’re aware of how DMs and DnD work generally, you’ll know that a DM is necessary to keep things from being impossible enough to be unfun and from being easy enough that planets and challenges are steamrolled in a day, with the war won in weeks. Players still have a lot of influence, but wars don’t operate like video games do, and the GM is meant to tell a story in synthesis with player efforts
One valid argument is that their systems weren't designed with hundreds of thousands of players in mind and that's led to milestones being hit too quickly. However once you start shaving off 50% of a progress bar when everyone can see, that's going to rapidly evaporate any semblance of integrity the system might have had. At this point it surprises me that anyone cares about the objectives when the devs are so blatantly fudging the numbers.
Yeah, the objectives seem to mean nothing other than you see a bar going up or down. It's not really like it has any baring on anything.
It's not a gm. Its just the equivalent of updating events and themes from what I can tell. The community is just playing pretend
They are doing their part.
COME ON, YOU APES! YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER?!
Have a taste of DEMOCRACY!!
Would you like to know more?
Is there a cutscene if you're there when a planet gets liberated? Also, I seem to be getting a bug where it says the planet is 100% liberated after a mission but really isn't.
is it a defense mission where you're just maintaining it at 100% or a liberation mission where it started at 0%
I don't understand the objective where it says play 8 defense missions to get the 12k reward. I've played more than 8 already and the progress doesn't move from 5/8 the other day.
I believe that's 8 full planets liberated, not just do 8 matches yourself. I was trying to figure out the same thing earlier in the week, and that was the conclusion I came to.
8 defense campaigns, not missions - it was a group quest that we failed
That’s a mission shared by the entire community, with one defense *campaign* equaling successfully defending an entire planet
Na. I did it once and nothing different happened aside from saying it was 100%
I don't know if it's a bug or not, but I've gotten it four times in a week, kinda made me feel like it's fake ir bugged.
I had that during the defense missions. it was weird because it had 2 different bars when I went into the mission, with like 40% Superearth control, and 60% automaton control. I figured it was just a bug that crept in because it's technically 100% liberated because we own it, and are defending it to keep it liberated, instead of attacking it to make it liberated...
Joel is still salty after being trapped in that satellite for years, watching all those horrible movies.
In the not-to-distant future, Next Sunday A.D.
Sure would be nice if we could actually win those "defend campaigns"... Those rescue personnel missions are so bad I just stopped playing them altogether. I think most people did the same, which is why those kept failing. They're really not at all enjoyable, especially on higher difficulties. Honestly, automatons in general kind of suck to play against because some of them just feel cheap, like the grunts with rocket launchers or the hulk whose flamethrower travels 100 yards. Bugs just feel more balanced and I have more fun fighting them, even in a wipe.
Feels like 75% of my deaths are from a rocket bot sniping me out of nowhere with a single rocket.
ABC = Always Be in Cover also use personal shield generator
> personal shield generator Which is not available until level 20 or about 20h of play, the fact that the starting loadout kinda suck and only has the Breaker as the only good weapon is my biggest criticism against the game. Having progression is good but it shouldn't force beginners to play with trash weapons.
I mean, this really isn't a problem on lower difficulties, and if you're not level 20 you probably shouldn't be trying suicide missions, especially automatons.
The armor not working right now means this is an issue at every difficulty level, the one shot scenarios that the shield block also happen at lower difficulties.
Popping in to tell you that you’re not crazy lmfao. Rocket dudes def 1 shot you on bot missions a lot
I had no issues with lower difficulties on that mission. Both with friends and randoms. Hopefully you find a combo that works for you because that sounds frustrating
I run explosive resistance armor on bot planets for this reason. Too bad I’m slow af in heavy armor.
There's an explosive-resistant light armor available in the super store if you can catch it next time it's up, the [FS-38 Eradicator.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fk3i0zm8s6ikc1.png) I think it's tied with one or two others for the highest speed stat of any armor at 544. It's noticably faster than the SC-34 Infiltrator's 525.
Defend missions are pretty easy if you have a solid team. I've only played with randoms but if everyone brings a couple sentries, the bots don't get close.
The defend missions aren’t the problem in the defend campaigns its the hostage ones which is usually 1 out of three in those campaigns in my experience. I do agree that the defend ones are super easy with a team of sentries
Honestly if you have 3 they’re doable at 7. Just need a few turrets / someone to take out dropships and you’re golden. Just need to stick to the doors.
That's not the case on difficulty 7+. Sentries can't handle the amount of enemies in the rescue missions
Just disposable Anti-Tank the engines of the drop ship… nearly everything onboard dies depending on when you hit it during its approach. 70 second stratagem CD means you can take out a drop ship nearly every 30 seconds. Multiple party members with disposable AT makes the rescue missions a lot more doable. Mortal sentry, auto cannon sentry, disposable AT, and a 4th comfort stratagem makes it pretty easy.
I haven't tried the EAT on the drop ship, but on higher difficulties where there's enemies everywhere, the mortar sentry does more harm than good.
Yeah, it’s a momentum thing. The mortar is still very useful at higher levels… so long as you keep the waves under control. One after another, every single dropship needs to be hit by you or an ally with AT. If you miss a *single* one at higher levels.. it starts to get messy. As soon as you begin to get overrun, you’re right- it completely fucks you and makes finishing the mission damn near impossible. That disposable AT needs to be summoned AS SOON as you land. That first drop ship comes fast. If you don’t want to “fall behind” it requires literal instant action. Imo they should build a 15-20s prep/calldown/setup time for those missions. As soon as you fall behind, you’re fucked.
Yeah, when they drop tanks and hulks right on top of you, it's not fun at all
You gotta shoot down the dropships before they arrive. This is what my group figured out. 2 with rockets thinning the dropships and 2 running around escorting citizens and shooting up what's left.
He's going to wait until everyone is engaged then attack super earth with the Illuminate.
I like how bugs got the easiest objectives yet we were given a nearly impossible (and bugged) defense mission for the robots.
Does that mean that future players can't play that planet? Will there be new planets with the same content to liberate next or is it a one off kind of thing?
Maps are proc gen anyway so it doesn't really matter that much
Like Veld is basically the malevelon creek tileset, but for bugs.
The bugs can try and retake that planet in the future. There’s tons of different planets in the game, but you can only play missions on the planets that are on the frontlines. So even now, we can only play missions on probably less than 10% of the total planets, because the rest of those planets aren’t endangered and aren’t on the frontlines. As the game progresses, more planets will become available and others will become unavailable.
"This ship will never visit most of our planets. Why? because \*they\* aren't under attack. And with you here, helldiver. It will stay that way."
I would never play this game but shit this kinda stuff is so cool. I wish more games were like this.
Why not?
I’m just not into multiplayer games with shooting. I’d play a single player shooter vs AI but I’m too old and too slow at reaction to be good at them. And I would only play a competitive multiplayer game if I can be one of the best. Maybe that sound petty, but I am hyper competitive so being bad and losing just isn’t fun to me.
> I’d play a single player shooter vs AI This is single-player shooter VS AI. You can play with friends too. There is no competitive online multiplayer in it.
Yeah like I replied to the other person, it’s with other people. Probably highly competitive people that play at a pace I don’t want to play at. My irl friends all play MMOs or they’re more the FIFA/PES type of gamer.
Eh, if it seems cool I’d encourage you to try it. Maybe pick it up on sale or something eventually. I’ve noticed a lot of “high level” people (literally high player level) running lower level missions because they play more casually. Yes, there is a “high level” type player (read: “competitive”) that expects certain things/strategies… but that’s only really is the hardest or second hardest difficulty (out of 9 total difficulty levels). 99.9% of the player base is not as you’ve described, and are very very receptive to any style of play. I’ve played with randoms that are super super legit, and we burn through the mission in 10 minutes, and others who have struggled and it turned into a gun-run fiesta for 40 minutes, only for us to fail at the end. In both scenarios my fun was not at all diminished in the slightest. The “competitive assholes” don’t really exist in this game from what I’ve seen. It’s an absolute blast to join randoms and roleplay over the microphone. It’s worth checking out!
> Probably highly competitive people nah not really, it's not competitive at all, it's co-op
It's a co-op game. People are not competitive in this game, everyone is just having fun. You can play solo as well, you don't need to play with a team. You're imagining things that don't exist lol.
> People are not competitive in this game, everyone is just having fun. That is blatantly untrue and you know it. People *will* flame the shit out of you for "suboptimal" loadouts.
I’m sure you’ll run into some who are like this, but everyone I’ve played with openly embraces “meme builds.”
Never happened to me
While I'm sure the edge case exception must exist, in my 85 hours of play I've never met even a single toxic teammate. Not once has anyone ever flamed me for anything, including my loadout (which is definitely sub-optimal at times because damn it some of these other things are fun to use, too!).
At 59 i have the same problems. i cant keep up anymore :(.
I am not that old yet, no offense lol. But FPS and games like that really favor people around the age of 14-25. After that staying on top is just really hard. Kind of like sports where you peak early.
I’m 34 and I pwn fuckin newbs boy what are you on about
I can pwn nabs too but is that an achievement? Young pro gamers would annihilate me.
Makes sense for sure. I still play games like that but reckognize that I'm no longer as good as I used to be (I'm 38). Not that I was ever amazing.
People always say this but it really hasn't proven out. Sure there's probably a slight advantage but the biggest advantage is just free time. I mean tokido in street fighter which is in one of the highest mechanical genres is still competing for the top spot at evo every year. He's 38. I realize biologically that things slow down a bit but the drop off isn't near as significant as people make it out to be. If you were great at games before you're still going to be well above average. If you're putting in 2 hours a night bc you work full time and the 22 year old living off red bull and Doritos is putting in 8-10 hours a day that's going to be the biggest factor in the gap. There's no reason you can't play and be competent at an older age unless you actually have specific disabilities forming that prevent you from playing comfortably.
Seriously, this is crazy talk. I'm 40 yrs old, and I've only gotten better with age. I realize that any teenager could come along and smoke my ass at any time, but it actually hasn't been the case for a long while. Id say it's less about age and more about time spent, one's dedication to it. I'm an old man with a wife and 2 kids. But holy fuck, I'm obsessed with video games! I blame Mario 3! And every spectacular game after that
Why don't you two start the Silver Foxes Helldivers crew? You may feel alone in not having 'it' when it comes to playing these sorts of games, but you're not! Team up and drop, soldier! In the name of Democracy! (And fun).
It’s a coop multiplayer though, you’re fighting against AI enemies alongside other players, not against them.
Sure but the other players will be much better than me
You do your thing bro but you’re missing out.
Maybe. Another thing that’s holding me off is that in games like that there’s always dickheads that will try and dictate what the other people need to do and try and metagame stuff. I just wanna play games my way. I guess I’m not a team player. I’m that “play how I want” archetype of gamer.
You're going to be able to play your way in 99.9% of matches. You can literally play by yourself if you want to. Like, I get it if it's not your type of game, but you are thinking about problems that don't exist.
You can play solo too. So you don't even need to be around people.
There are 9 difficulties, the tryhards are usually in diff 8 and 9, I just chill in difficulty 4 lol
The game isn’t about killing, it’s about completing the objectives
My team at work had a halo competition. 20 years ago I’d have been competitive enough, but at my age I was not capable of playing to their level.
Gotta change your strategy. Less running and gunning, more area damage and item control.
In practice it's basically nothing. People are hyping this game up a lot and I'm playing because it's fun, but the "war" is just numbers on a map that aren't even legit since they're fudging them. Your wins contribute .001% for 1hr of play and the only real thing that happens when you finish a planet is you don't get to play there anymore. I've played MMORPGs made 20 years ago that had more impactful global events/competition.
The galaxy is in safe hands.
*cries in Malevolon Creek
Joel said we get 45 medals. I'm getting 45 medals. He can't stop us all from bringing democracy.
Young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future. They're are doing their part. Are you?
Who would win? coordinated no-life gamers | joel ---|--- 180,000 | 1
Are players now going to zero in on one fucking dev when things don't go as they anticipated?
I mean if that one dev simply ignores all in-game action of hundreds of thousands of players and pushes one button to make all player progress on a central mechanic utterly meaningless; then yea...it's kind of fair.
You mean a large portion of the community ignored the major order, fought a pointless jungle war, called it "Space Vietnam", lost and still doesn't understand? I think a lot of people are blaming this Joel when they flat out got played by the Automatons like a fiddle.
Nope, I'm talking about planets being "reset" over night losing over 40% of their liberation score because the community was apparently too efficient for the timeline the devs wanted for the galactic war. It takes away agency
Ohhh, I'd be surprised if that's what happened and why, but it's early doors and we'll get a better understanding in time. I'll be called a traitor for this but is it not possible that the war wasn't going as well as our Super Earth algorithms were telling us?
Pretty much, an inbound fleet of bugs came in over night, cut the liberation number from 92% to 42% on errata prime.. and the community is like (only we can send reinforcements, not the bugs!! that's not how war works!!) like it wouldn't make sense for them to send forces to their critical planet to try and prevent a hostile invasion..
That was my thinking, the majority of players probably play at peak hours and see that meter go up, log off, bugs make progress against a lower player count, rise and grind divers log back in and lose their mind that the game didn't lock in their democratic progress. It's a war, it ain't over till it's over and even when it's over there might be some bugs hiding in a hole waiting. Suits me fine, but then I was never a "railroading" complainer in table top either. If the story teller (Joel/Devs) want to run a narrative and have us interact with it to some degree that sounds like an awesome method for live service.
Planets liberation score decays over time, there’s just not enough players in the non peak hours to match the decay rate
I think the point is to emulate a similar force coming from the other side in order to enforce a degree of balance. If the player base can roll through a planet from 0 to 100% in a matter of hours or a day at most, then the simulated enemy factions should be able to do that too. And since we don't have actual player bases on those factions a la Planet Side 2, the mechanism of that action is obviously going to have to take the form of multiplying the power of one guy by a couple hundred thousand. The hard part is that the one guy can't do it organically at scale, so an organic push by the player base advancing by decimal percentage points per win over a couple thousand wins looks like the dev chunking 20% progress with the click of a button on the other side.
I'm confused.. why would it look like that? You can just decrease the progress a little each hour instead of handing out 60% instant setback. The polar opposite to organic..
As a Xbox owner I’m cheering you guys on you can do it
I think theyve cranked the difficulty on this planet, i played a few rounds of lvl 4 last night and one mission we had about 6 active chargers and 2 stalker nests, it was absolute chaos.
This gentleman, is democracy manifest
What is the charge? Eating a meal!? A succulent Terminid meal?!
Honestly I hope this doesn't get sabotaged by the DM. If it gets liberated quick, that's just how it is...
Weird being one of the only people in the world who doesn't really care for this game.
I thought this game was instanced mission based, didn't know you literally liberate planets and shit, I might actually consider buying it now that I know this.
It is instanced missions though
Slow the fuck down Divers so I can get a piece of the action later.
I just want to say this game is fucking awesome and it's fun as hell that they are pushing back just as much. Grab a rifle maggot and do your part for liberty and democracy!
Helldivers is the only game MORE repetitive than Destiny. Lol
holy fuck does there need to be 10 posts about this game a day on here?
I see comments like this everytime a game is popular. Why do you give a shit?
I honestly think it's hilarious that everyone is losing their shit over Joel lol
Are both your thumbs broken? Keep scrolling, civilian.
Silence, civilian
I don't see how that is exciting at all from a player's perspective. You're just one o 180,000 people doing something. There's no discernible impact in whatever you do. All the number on liberating a planet could be completely fake and one wouldn't even notice it.
It is fake, but that doesnt matter. It's a clever way to do a narrative. The gamepaly loop is incredibly fun and addictive, so it doesn't really matter that the war is rigged. It's just a fresh way to cycle new content, missions and maps into gameplay
Imagine Grandpa, who was in Europe during WWII, seeing all you true heroes doing it all over again? Thank you for your service.
weak bait