Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead made a few weapon balance tweaks with the Escalation of Freedom update, at least one of which was a nerf, and some players are really not ecstatic about it.
Yes, let’s forget about the up-to-date features and other fixes the update brought. For better or worse, we’re back to the discussion of whether the studio that brought galactic warfare to Super Earth should dial back its so-called meta-weapons or listen more to players who don’t want their favorite weapons to become a little less enjoyable to operate.
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The changes that are catching the most flak are to the fire-based weapons, which is pretty ironic considering a whole fire-themed Warbond set is due out tomorrow, August 8. So what did Arrowhead do? Well, it “adjusted the flame effects to make them more realistic” and changed the Incendiary Breaker shotgun to reduce the number of magazines it can hold while increasing its recoil.
How about 20 million posts on the main page of the game subreddit These changes have not been well-received at this point, with some players feeling so betrayed by Arrowhead, who they believe is going against their previous statements about taking player feedback into account when making changes like this, that they have ended up with a slew of negative reviews on Steam as a result.
It looks like a little over 1,000 of those last rolled in over the last day and a bitthough the game’s overall verdict is still “Mostly Positive.” “The devs seem to think nerfing everything is the way to go, despite it being a co-op PvE game, not a multiplayer PvP shooter,” one reads, “If players are having fun, let them.”
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Arrowhead responded to the controversy, with CEO Shams Jorjani tweeting: “A ton of players are coming back to the game to try it out. We’re tracking bugs/issues and planning a fix in advance. I’m getting a lot of feedback on different parts of the update. Different groups of players like/dislike different things – depending on playstyle.”
“At one point, the kill switch was about 30% of all Terminid sessions,” he added regarding that particular change in Discord comment“A very meta weapon. Is that a problem? Yes. Is that a big problem? I don’t know. We’ll talk about that.”
IN another tweet after the Discord feedback round that resulted in this comment ended, he thanked players for their feedback and said, “We’ll be listening more closely to your feedback and there will be more improvements/fixes in the future.”
What do you think of these changes to fire-based weapons? Have they dampened your enthusiasm for Escalation of Freedom or Freedom’s Flame warbond? Let us know below!
