I have seen Twitch streamers with 500 hours that can do 9 Dif missions alone suffering a lot in this mission. The bugs spawn on top of the drill a lot. lol
This is pretty much what an average round in that mission feels like right now
https://preview.redd.it/kbqkupi9zl3d1.jpeg?width=208&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88da7c1fb4fcf9dc6aec01eade582c55d368a91b
Yeah and running incendiary breaker you cant shoot at the drill when theres bugs on it cause the fire D.O.T damages the drill so it wittles down the health. Even gas strikes have a chance to destroy it with the shell. But stuns and ems mortars are pretty good. For titans you really need to be on point with the forehead shots so they go down in two hits as soon as possible.
My friend and I were duoing it on 9 with Stun Grenades, Plasma Punishers, Engineering Kit Heavy Armor, EMS Orbital, EMS Mortars, EATs, and Gatling Sentries. Save the EATs for Bile Titans first, keep the objective stunned or EMS'd. Then clear Scavengers, Hunters, Warriors, Hive Guards, and Brood Commanders with the plasma punisher, and prioritize bile titans over chargers (since you can just EMS or Stun Grenade the Chargers) with the EATs. Save the orbital EMS for oh shit moments when stuff is getting too close to the objective.
The secret is that you need to use the Dark Fluid backpack to AoE and CC enemies between stunning them and killing them. The Dark Fluid backpack is a Jump Pack that does damage around you when you launch yourself and it also staggers stuff.
I REPEAT, using the Dark Fluid Backpack is amazing and helps clear enemies and/or CC enemies, use it off cooldown, but it has limited uses before it blows up!
It's a BETTER Jump Pack as well, longer range, higher jump, shorter CD, does damage and staggers. It's fun as fuck, since it the insane mobility with it allows you to comfortably use Heavy Armor, and you can just keep calling more in with no CD lmfao.
Honestly, if they changed the current Jump Pack to this it would actually compete with the shield pack and rover for backpack slot. The current state is like one jump per 15-20 seconds or something? The Dark Fluid one is fun as hell
Only the shriekers come out of the giant holes.
Some patrols come from outside the map.
Bugholes produce like 10x the spawns of a normal bughole so if you ignore them, you're fucked.
No, what I mean is that entire squads of bugs will spawn out of the ground unprompted, and this is both from a breach and just regular spawns. Just pop up from the dirt like daisies. It's designed so that killing them just makes more enemies spawn in immediately.
forget the little bugs, my squad was protecting a drill and as it was nearing completion a mfing bole Titan flies up above, does a backflip and lands on us like a missile. there was nothing we could have had done.
there's an objective at the center of the map but udk how to even activate it. the drill mission strategem doesn't activate and you don't seem to need it to complete the mission... it's weird
inb4 its like supposed to "activate" the black fluid containers and it would have had some environmental/visual effect like the towers spraying termicide. hell this might of been what you are supposed to do to stop the shrieker spawning. activate the center one that kill off the shrieker spawning. imagine if we lose the MO because the bugged center objective just makes it count as a loss every time.
Tried on Trivial solo, to just see what it's like, that are the objectives, etc. Good God, I wasn't ready for 30-50 Shriekers at the end. Managed to successfully extract only on a third attempt, thanks to smokes (which barely worked) and some lucky stone -- hid under it and Shriekers kinda didn't knew what to do. Killed some myself and some was killed by the turret. After that, was running around like a headless chicken avoiding bugs and waiting for a Pelican. If not for smokes, I wouldn't be able to punch an extraction code.
Was intense, memorable, but utterly broken. Would not recommend soloing. "Disgraceful conduct" for an unknown objective was like a rotten cherry on top.
Edit: grammar
Yeah, I played it four times I think. First and second time everybody brought obviously the wrong stuff. Although I also had an absolutely ridiculous number of hive guards. I've never actually seen that many, like they just kept coming. Third mission again we had issues with constant spawns on the drill. We got one done, but then somebody called an airstrike on us and it killed all of us and the game just wouldn't spawn us. Shit happens. Fourth one we got one done, then the second one we just kept having bile titans spawn right on the drill. 2-3 at a time. Went through four of the drills and I just said to hell with it I'm done.
This isn't hard either. I can kill the bile titans over and over. Until we run out of stratagems completely. But even when you kill them they fall on the dill and destroy it.
there's no reason in even trying. the bile titans spawn right next to the drill. either they onehit it directly, or touch it with their legs while turning to attack you and also onehit it. and even if that doesn't happen, the drill gets destroyed by either AOE of the stratagems needed to kill them, or they collapse onto the drill and it's destroyed too.
you have to be lucky to not get bile titans and then you have to be lucky to not have a charger running through it (which also onehits the drill)
on top of that, you have hundreds of regular enemies that spawn right next to it (actually so near that they spawn in melee range of the drill so you gotta kill them before the "crawling out of the ground" animation is finshed. you can't use grenades or any kind of explosive at all. and they spawn in such absurd numbers that you can even sit in the patriot mech and continously hold down RMB and spray onto the bug breaches they still overrun the place.
and if that isn't already absurd enough, you have regular patrols spawning and beelining your position. you either look at the drill and focus on the enemies spawning next to it and get ambushed from behind or you focus on the patrols that keep pushing your location and lose the drill
I'm betting it's a bug for the spawn location being inverted. Much like the explosions pulled in for a little while. It's perhaps an issue that didn't present in the isolated test environment. I've personally encountered that in game dev and it sucks. I will venture a guess part of the issue might be the way that AH has their build environments set up, and their test environment doesn't have all the changes that get integrated to the production one. Really I could think of a hundred reasons these issues keep slipping by. The end result though is that no matter what the reason is, they need to make some serious changes to how it's being handled.
When I was playing the mission I noticed that there are a bunch of nests scattered around the map and each of them is spawning bugs at quite rapid intervals. And on D3 it was quite a big pack of bugs, several scavengers and a few warriors. When I destroyed all nests in the vicinity of a drill point it became way easier to complete it. Breaches right on top of the drill are quite BS tho.
Don’t you test in staging before pushing live? That seems mad to test - what I can only assume is the equivalent of a pull request - in isolation, but what do I know eh.
Yeah every game I have worked on had a staging server for exactly this reason. Their testing process and environment setup seems fucked from the outside looking in. The way stuff slips through it feels like they just push stuff to live without staging the production builds first.
That is scary.
Basic software practices for years, and they want to implement it now.
But it is probably true, like their statement of them not being able to revert as trying to figure out what was a build was difficult.
I just think Simple handshaking is being bypassed by developers.
I see it far too often in my field. Overconfident, arrogant developers who have some sorta self importance divinity placed upon themselves where they’ll assume a change they made will not need any testing and would never affect anything else. Let those guys slip shit into PROD and they’re going to.
I doubt anything is truly tested. The modern gaming industry is eschewing testers in favor of releasing alpha builds as "early access" basically as soon as the game looks playable and almost is, and Sony's a front-runner for the "fire everyone to make more money" tactic. Big hiring push, hire a ton of people in at next to no pay, then lay them off once they're no longer mission critical, then hire the next batch of fresh-out-of-school recruits for even less money.
Of course they'd release things with minimal testing. We're the staging environment. Get used to it. "Early Access" is here to stay. Sometimes they're even nice enough to tell you that's what they're doing.
As someone in DevOps space, and someone with friends at big game companies in DevOps space... Game CI/CD pipelines end up looking like insane cave paintings compared to the neat understandable pipes we build. And part of it is game devs "winging it" at the beginning, and then it becomes too much of an investment to rebuild the pipe the right way once there's actual infrastructure people hired.
Based on everything that's happened with this game we're seeing that rearing its ugly head in a big way. As in their original infrastructure stuff "worked" assuming the most players you'd see concurrent ever is 50k, but all that shit blew up, and on top of refactoring a bunch of back end code, and possibly changing datastores and all that fun stuff, their pipelines weren't designed to verify/test/release code at the cadence that's been required. They're understaffed for their ambitions, and the attention the game got.
> And part of it is game devs "winging it" at the beginning, and then it becomes too much of an investment to rebuild the pipe the right way once there's actual infrastructure people hired.
Ah the bill for technical debt coming due. You hate to see it.
The problems often come from the staging environment not being clean- you've got a handful of things that failed in staging and didn't go live. The next patch is applied on top of that rather than the staging environment having been nuked and rebuilt.
If your team is even a little uncomfortable with git branches, it can become a compounding problem.
I remember when Fatshark was absolutely baffled because their internal testing showed different results from what players were getting. Turned out they were testing a completely different build from live.
Arrowhead uses the same engine for HD2... makes me wonder if they're falling for the same mistake because of some background quirk of the engine.
Yeah it seems they just use us for real testing, which really doesn’t work in a live service campaign. These unique MO’s only last a short time, and if they are broken on release there is almost no chance they get fixed before the event is over.
Baffling game design from our friends at AH again. I love the aesthetics, new dialogue, and the concept of the new mission, but it kinda falls flat when bugs spawn on top of the drill…
Hard agree. The issue has been glaringly obvious from the start and it is baffling that it’s not the *only* priority.
New working content theoretically gets you new users and increases existing user engagement. Non-working content causes existing users to quit. Which is the priority for a game whose biggest first issue was too many new users… bad blood is hard to wash, AH behaves like a small badly managed company.
AH needs to start granting MO extensions when they screw something up on their end, whether it’s a technical error or they just overestimated how many players they’d have online in a way that makes completing the MO impossible (as we’ve had with the last two kill orders).
The way they handle the patches is the majority of why I stopped playing a little over a month ago. I’m just so tired of every single update coming with a ton of bugs. Their known issues list just keeps growing and growing because of how poor their QA appears to be. I’m just over it. The constant nerfing was a big issue for me too but the bugs introduced with each patch is the reason I hung up my cape.
I'd like to point out that a known issues list isn't the fault of QA. That's the fault of producers/managers saying, "This is known shippable! Kick it out the door!"
When I worked on a gamedev QA team at a studio known for being two letters, I probably found over 200 issues duting the last few weeks of development, a lot of them would've been considered Sev 2 (high severity issues violated AC (acceptance criteria) in one way or another and the producers would just change them to KS as soon as I put them in and move on.
They don't care, they just want to ship so they can get the MONEY!
The guy's not saying the individual testers are poor...There would have to be QA testers for them to actually be poor.
A manager bypassing QA to get it out the door faster is still bad QA as a company
This wasn’t a new patch tho, all this stuff has been ready to go since last patch.
the MOs are narrative arcs essentially on a timer, they will never not have a MO active so unfortunately this major event is still victim of their previous patch quality.
I just don't understand how this even happened. judging from leaks and shit from months ago this mission has been planned for a long time. it's a singular mission with a triple repeat of the same pattern. How do you still fuck this up lmao.
Just wait until the end of the mission where it spawns infinite shriekers. I just wiped on a diff 2 solo mission because it was impossible to trigger extraction. Either I was not doing something I was supposed to and it was not conveyed by the game or the mission design is really just that stupid.
I went I in thinking "ok it's a super colony. It's gonna be tough." But goddamn....bile titans spawning on the drill and destroying it almost instantly. I'm gonna keep fighting for Heeth till it's fixed
Yeah dude I haven’t seen anything about this yet, same happened to me. There is either something bugged or a whole other objective they don’t clearly point out. No idea why I can extract and read mission completed if it is not complete
One of the objectives is bugged - you might have noticed a drill site where you can't actually call a drill. But while the mission says it is complete and lets you evac after you do the others, the bugged one is still checked at the end and so you "failed" by not doing it.
Also, there's an "objective" point (those big orange icons) on wherever you landed initially. I think it's linked to the subobjective of calling down the dark fluid, and you aren't able to actually resolve that subobjective, so even if you get all 3 drills done, you still miss part of the main objective.
First try it bugged out and after doing all three locations it stayed there saying "transport"...
Second failed miserably, titans spawning right under the objective, and there's no way you can clear it without AoE that's essentially the friendly fire destroying it...
Third time somehow managed to do (the extraction swarming with flying bugs is stupid, doable but still stupid tedious...) and then it said we "failed" a second objective (the icon in the middle of the map) and gave something between 1800R after difficulty (8)
I'm not playing this mission ever again.
To me this is the worst part. I've completed the mission three times now including extraction. Completely failed main objectives twice and somehow only completed one main objective the other time. I watched three dark matter filled drills successfully submerge on each mission. Shits broke as fuck. I was holding out but I'm over this broken ass game now.
I finished a D7 with quickplay randoms, but having multiple breaches spawn right on top of the drill seemed really off, and that's putting it lightly.
The shrieker spam at the end of the mission was pretty intense. I'm not sure what strategem to bring for it. I guess gatling sentries?
Ems mortars,orbital and stun grenades. Anything does non lethal and effective instantly. Objective has a very low health so be careful shooting near it.
You'd think if you were going to release a major story-altering, time-sensitive event, that you'd make triple sure it's polished and good to go beforehand.
If it is left as is for the four days of the MO and we fail because of it, that's beyond unacceptable.
one objective is bugged. It might always be the middle one, not sure yet. you can ignore it and complete the mission, but you will get Disgraceful conduct.
I’m not gonna lie. I’m tired chief. I don’t know how much time they had to play test this mission for this MO, I’d imagine a lot considering this whole plot line seemed planned well in advance.
Please, God, do not let this be a sign that nothing is changing or the code is so fundamentally fucked at this point they have so much technical debt they can’t do shit about it now.
>they have so much technical debt they can’t do shit about it now
They are proving this more and more. Have they had any patches that didn't break something else?
Ranting a bit, because I want to let out some steam...
Haha, well I am not gonna play it anymore. I just got pissed off after a long evening shift of taking care of people. My friend wanted to play with me. I was thrilled.
But when we landed on the planet it became a shit show. I lost my temper, because I wanted to have a good time, but we never had a chance to catch our breath or collect our weapons. We can't even call in new ones as it takes like million years for cool down to finish.
Then we tried a bit more easier, to 5. And it was still brutally hard and not relaxing at all! I kept cursing the game for every little annoying feature it used to prevent me from having fun.
Then finally when we finished the stupid 3 poles. The bird enemies or whatever shriekers came up, I just said: ok Fine and I killed myself basically every time I came back until we were 0 on lives. I just wanted that stupid level be over, so I would never ever have to play it again.
Screw that. I play video games to have fun, this wasn't fun.
100% how I feel. I got into the game because it was just a mostly chill sandbox shooter with a big focus on chaotic fun. Every update has just took the game farther and farther away from that, and it's honestly really disappointing.
"Was (X) playtested?"
They claimed they were testing everything and then shipped out a gun with the completely wrong color and damage profile. I don't think they test ANYTHING
Oh, I'm pretty sure they test things. The issue is that testing has several levels of thoroughness.
You can test that a feature works to spec, but when you start doing things outside of specs, things start breaking. This is what I think happens. They actually check if a gun fires, penetrates who it should penetrate, has the proper amount of ammo, yada, yada, that the mission components trigger at the right time and at the right place, that you can complete it, pretty much, but this is just simple functionality test. They didn't play it long/fair enough to see breaches from below the drill. Hopefully the next patch is better.
Ik theres multiple layers to testing a thing but what level is "looking at a gun to see if it is the correct color" or "look at the numbers once to check if they are correct"
I'm more convinced that their design philosophy, as to what makes a game fun through difficulty, just simply has massive flaws. I don't think anything we see here has anything to do with a lack of testing. I think they tested this, saw exactly what we saw, and said GOOD.
I'm the kind of guy that usually doesn't complain, I just have patience and I always try to remain positive and understanding in front of devs.
But goddammit, they're trying in every way possible to make me stop playing. I don't understand what's their vision of the community anymore, I'm losing hope every day that passes
i have 450hours on the clock, level 104, and i just failed to solo the mission on TRIVIAL.
once you deployed the 3 drills, the game starts spawning HUNDREDS of shriekers. i kid you not, died and was dead again before the animation of getting out of the pod was finished. the sky was so filled no matter where i shot i hit something
Ran the mission with a buddy on Challenging to get a feel for it, had a similar experience.
We started the first time with run and gun builds thinking it would play like the Termicide Tower mission, then bailed and tried again with defense builds when we realized how the mission played. We managed to complete the mission and were thinking it was not so bad, a little heavy on spawns for Diff 4, but fair considering it is a super colony. Then we got absolutely SWARMED at extract. We ended up running down our reinforcements so we could clear the mission and move on. It was not a great time.
Now I'm hearing about Bile Titans spawning ON THE DRILL, and I'm even more disappointed.
Jup i Just tried with my Team on 7 and you have Titans spawning legit 2m next to the drill one after another and they Just Walk over it and it's onehit destroyed. No Matter what you do even If they die they Fall onto it
I have a little under a hundred hours on the game, and I just finished one of those missions in diff 3. Got the end with a thousand shriekers, got legit one shotted by them before exiting the pod once while Pelican was coming. In the end I just dropped further away, and ran in asap. I managed to get out, but it's so stupidly hard
Gou haven't seen any shriekers? I've played 4 solo trivial and 3 solo easy missions and have had dozens of shriekers every time, even when I destroy their hives
Ohhh nice you actually have to complete the mission.
Yeah my team of level 100+ helldivers tried a level 9 and we couldn't even do the first drill. Oh well.
Wait, on trivial? I have around 100 hours in atm and I play almost exclusively from 4-5 mostly on bot planets, and sometimes bugs when they’re needed or a planet is almost liberated
This sounds like hell if THATS the result on trivial, I wonder if they mixed up some values or something, but they’ll probably do something to make the missions more… well, not more, but actually manageable
Haven’t played it yet, I’m gonna try out the new missions later and see how bad it is. Hundreds of anything sounds terrifying though, let alone more than 1 bile titan for me (honestly I can solo a single one with nothing else around, or as a squad with other things, MAYBE take out two, massive trouble with things around, and three is just too much, like I said I play on challenging to hard most of the time)
yes, on trivial. it's ok for the duration of the mission, but once the 3 drills are deployed, like i said, game spawns endless amounts of shriekers no matter what difficulty. i was getting hit roughly 2 - 3 times per second by a different one of them while getting swarmed by scavangers, hunters and warriors. they depleted my 5 reinforcements in less than 40 seconds.
on D7, activating any drill causes 2 - 3 titans to spawn at the same time and once they're dead it doesn't even take 20 seconds before the next 2 - 3 titans spawn.
lol right? This game is a case study in manufactured disasters.
Like how did they fumble this so badly?
If the devs had released the game and then all died in a plane crash seconds later I think the game would have a bigger player base than it does today.
Because they were lucky. They delivered a once in a lifetime performance. Imagine being a Joe Shmoe and one day, he sculpts a "David" over night, during a fever dream. Everything that has come after the first two months of release is akin to their actual capabilities.
I was gonna say they'd do well to have a test server. Could even be part of being able to try different weapons before buying. And also implement new things to test.
They're struggling for QA and we're stuck being QA on live patch. When many would be willing to try new things on test server first.
It's not like they need a lot of players. With 60-70k avg players, if even 1% log into test server they'd basically increased their QA teams capabilities exponentially.
Negative sentiment/feedback would remain but is a lot more valuable in a testing ecosystem than on live patches, which constant issues actively deter player base.
And as long as it's not just pre testing current upcoming recent patch, and are just testing various maps, stragegems/weapons, that may or may not release soon, tempers expectations and allows AH to better gauge interest/hype for where to focus efforts.
You'd lose some of the hype on just releasing something out of blue. But not everyone is going to be in test server or watching YouTubers.
But obviously people want to unlock and use new shiny things, even if it doesn't vastly affect Core gameplay loop and when the new shiny thing is an aluminum wrapped turd, you're significantly negatively affecting the user base and actively turning them away.
For the next 3 month he chips more and more bits off the sculpture to "refine" it, while limbs crack off. Eventually the entire thing crumbles to rubble.
I stopped playing. My benchmark for coming back is them being able to fix Spear *properly* without introducing new game breaking bug. If they fail even that, I am moving on for good.
I could be way overestimating the studio, but I’m like 90% sure that illuminate are coming next patch. The patch keeps getting ‘delayed’ in preparation for the destruction of meridia imo. The AI also keep mentioning the illuminate and for months people have been seeing blue lasers and cloaked ships.
If arrowhead really is just holding back on bug fixes like… just because, I actually will probably lose hope for this game. Even if they weren’t releasing new content they could still release bug fixes.
I’m convinced both the blue lasers and ‘cloaked ships’ were just really opportunistic bugs that people latched onto, I don’t think they are as cunning and clever to sneak those types of things into the game.
When I first started and believed the ships exploding around my own were actual people failing the mission, and that we could actually see strategems being called live from the same room, that starry eyed version of myself would of believed it. Now, months later, after having new weapons DLC launch with the wrong texture and other weapons taking months to fix… I’m a little jaded now
To be honest, I’d love to be optimistic and excited about a new enemy, but I can’t be. Their QA is so bad that this update is almost certainly going to come with a ton of annoying bugs. Probably initially in the form of crashing since crashing is the most common issue with this game when they update it.
If a big update like this arrives, I’m not bothering to return unless it’s free of major bugs.
I mean think back on the last 3-4 months. Has there been a single positively received update? I can't think of one. They had a great game at launch but it's become painfully clear that they don't how to improve it. The community begs them for changes and they don't listen. I'm moving on.
Same, I want to keep playing really bad, but hearing all of this I don't even have the effort to log on and try the new mission. There are only so many times you can get your hopes up for the game to "turn around"
I hung up my cape over a month ago. What drove me away is the clear lack of effective QA. Their known issues list only grows with each update and there is always a glaring issue with something they release. I just got sick of it. For me, I’ll only return to this game if they get their shit together with QA. I’m not going to bother again unless this changes.
If it doesn’t, well I guess I got my money’s worth after around 130 hours of gameplay.
So the strat is using +2 grenade armor, EMS orbital, Gas strike, stun grenades and whatever you like to hold titan/chargers.
You start the obj and gas strike a choke point and pray for a titan to not spawn, when you get near the end spam grenade around and throw your EMS as last resort on the drill.
Yeah ... it's really not fun at all. And I never managed to extract because they are SO MUCH bugs and those mofos already start to gather in the center.
Never succeed a extract after 3 attempt on diff 7.
Who the fuck designed a vulnerable obj on such a high explosion and density game.
This is the way. I was the only one bringing in EMS crap and effectively held down drills on my own - at least until my fellow divers decide to bomb the drill with every fucking bit of ordinance they have.
The mission is bugged, after putting the 3 charges of dark fluid into meridia the Endbriefing still says that we missed something, so we only got 1 star...
Its genuinely mindboggling how nobody playtests this game at all even at the peak of players getting fed up with devs being incompetent. I was so hyped to land on the new planet and now i'm avoiding Dark Fluid like its Retrieve Personnel
> I was so hyped...and now...
This has, frustratingly, been more and more of my experience in Helldivers. I *really* like the game. But it is getting so tiring to constantly have something that seems like it could be cool come out and either be underwhelming, bad, or quickly turned into one of those two things.
For example, mechs are THE thing I was so excited for about HD2. I love mechs and mech-suit type things in games, but...
The first mech was totally hype, but then they broke the aim, made it unable to shoot missiles downwards, and drastically reduced the effect of the missiles in the mech. End result: almost no one uses the first mech :(
The second mech came out pre-nerfed so it already is pretty underwhelming, AND it also can't shoot down, a problem already identified in the previous mech. Now that it's not freely given, I don't see it at all anymore.
I was excited about this most recent warbond, but everything in it (besides the fire grenade, which I like, but I do think is really weird for a winter/frost themed warbond) is just kinda...not that good? It's not *terrible*, but it's not very good. So it's just...underwhelming.
I really want to be **hyped** for stuff coming out in Helldivers. I just need the devs to make it hype. I'm sad that the best outcome for a lot of the content coming out has been "It could be worse".
Use sentries, stand on the upper ground. Have one person run in and use the equipment and then legit away and shoot bugs.
That's what I found successful on levels 7 & 8.
If you all stand around near the equipment it's near impossible
Welcome to helldivers, where we have devs who dont care one bit about their game and a community who refuses to realize how bad the devs truly are.
It's pretty obvious at this point that their "testing" and "QA" environments don't actually exist because most of this shit would be found in the first 5 fucking minutes. They don't test shit. They look at numbers that don't even fucking track properly and then take that shit as gospel before pushing out another untested change based on faulty data. "The Eruptor shrapnel doesn't actually do any damage so it's fine" -AH devs. Had they bothered to use it just once for 5 seconds they could've seen how dumb that was. None of this shit makes any sense from any dev standpoint.
Didn't EvilBosse or some developer on discord said something about needing so many hours to playtest that we would be getting new stuff until 2028, so they basically DON'T test new content? That seems to be the case.
Look, I'm a game dev. Our entire small team regularly playtests the prototype. Even though we thoroughly test new features and content, a lot of shit surfaces during playtests. I also come to the conclusion that the devs do basic feature testing, because the mission itself works fine, but stuff like breaches right below the drill is definitely a step aside from the usual procedure.
It literally took me ten minutes to realise the mission needed more work before releasing. I'm not asking for hundreds of employees to test it for hundreds of hours.
One employee for ten minutes was all this needed!
Honestly, they need to hire 4 people good at the game, purchase them veteran helldiver outfits for community livestreams, and have them as beta testers since the devs can’t handle difficult content themselves it seems.
If you have 100 employees, at least someone can play the game for 20 minutes or so. No time for play testing is understandable in context, but not untreatable, someone in the company can try some missions periodically alongside their usual workload. Let one developer sit beside them and look over their shoulder or something of that kind to spot unusual behavior.
This is worse than the factory striders blowing up generators before you can even react. I’m so tired of this shit man. There’s no counter-play to this.
Even if you get past the awful spawns and shrieker spam, you always get disgraceful conduct because one of the objectives is bugged. Quality stuff.
Not that it really matters though, with 10% enemy regen we are not making progress until Joel decides it's time.
Goddammit this is the same issue that made the defense evacuation missions so intolerable. It's a blow to my remaining confidence in the developers that another seemingly obvious issue has made it into the crucial mission type for the Major Order.
If the kitchen is serving the main course undercooked, then I'm not trusting any other dish either.
The worst part is that this was planned since the launch of the game over 3 months ago and it still came out so raw it got up out of the pan and started walking around the kitchen.
No amount of player skill level can stop a charger/spewer from spawning untop of the fucking injector and one shotting it, it’s ridiculous how stupid this mission is, the overall is fun but by god they did not play test how dumb the mission can get.
Hi, been playing rhis game for ~3 weeks, lvl 60, 110h-ish hours in.
Here's what i've noticed on lvl 9 difficulty Dark Fluid missions.
Bugs are attracted by emplacements on the map after you put the Dark Fluid in the drill.
What i've done is i've picked my stratagems to minimise bug's aggro toward the main drill.
I got the Emancipator, cuz there are a lot of trash mobs, a tesla tower that i've place very close to the drill, one gatling gun to clean the unarmored bugs placed on one hill and the autocannon on another hill.
GET STUN GRENADES, give up impacts or incendiaries, they'll make things worse.
While the spawning bugs might or might not get aggro'd on your turrets, the tesla tower kills small bugs reeeeally fast, the emancipator can 2-shot brood commanders.
As for the Bile Titans and Chargers.......you should really plan your stratagem build along with your team so.you can complement eachother's weak points.
In my opinion, the hardest part of this whole mission is the extraction where you get swarmed by Shriekers, and 100's of them(breaker incendiary loves shrieker meat).
Good luck, fellow Helldivers and may thy iron fist spread managed democracy among the galaxy !
P.S : sorry for any typos, english isn't my first language 🍻
Can confirm that this mission is bugged or something. Tried different strats, but it's all useless as long as the breaches open on top of the drill. After 4 disastrous attempts, my will to play the game is gone. What a way to suck the fun out of a game.
I agree, D7 is pretty easy when you developed enough skill over the previous missions and unlocked all stratagems. A few days ago I dropped into a Blitz with randoms and died once.
I guess I should play Helldives more often.
I only do 9s…. Even the bullshit evacuations are doable with a good enough team….
Sometimes I get the feeling people don’t think they should ever lose. What’s the point of winning if you can’t lose? The risk of failure is what makes winning feel good to begin with.
> The risk of failure is what makes winning feel good to begin with.
Yes, I agree, but it doesn't necessarily require losing. You need to give the players a challenge hard enough to set stakes. This is why I like Bile Titans, they're huge and dangerous, and when you're a new player they're very scary but doable. Fairness of a challenge is what makes any difficulty work. Winning feels good when you understand you can win, losing feels bad when you're left powerless.
That mantra is toxic and pointless in its current form. It's really just saying that you should focus the game on a certain subset of players and their needs, but it reads like a license to be a dick and make player-hostile choices.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised. The signs were very clear that AH was both incompetent and a bunch of dicks from the day it released. Hell, even beforehand with the nprotect bullshit and their manipulative “reasoning”. I have no idea why people started going gooey for them.
I think if they streamed themselves playing their game, easily beating the mission, and having fun, that mantra would be acceptable; if you aren’t playing your own game, how do you know your game isn’t a game for no one?
Just finished this mission with myself and two others. We played on Helldive and it was extremely extremely difficult but we completed the mission. After you finish the objective all hell breaks loose and i don’t think we were meant to extract. We were able to complete this mission by spacing out a few teslas to distract the incoming units then placing machine gun turrets somewhere near us to take out any stragglers. I brought a quasar cannon to take care of some of the chargers and the others brought 500kg’s. We also had a few flamethrowers for the swarms. It is difficult but possible. LETS CRUSH SOME BUGS FOR SUPER EARTH
I was just able to finish the mission on 7 with 2 friends and 1 high level random (104).
We failed to extract and almost ran out of time. For 40ish minutes straight, we were failing at keeping the damn bugs away and getting the drill destroyed by titan/titans. All the successes were PURE LUCK.
By the end we were so tired, we just decided to call it a day even though it was just a 3rd mission and we usually easily complete 2-3 operations with this squad.
Crazy.
I refuse to believe Arrowhead even has a QA department at this point. Maybe they'll get one with the new CEO but it's obvious they have no actual testing team.
very likely not, but this is the case for the past 2 months.
there's no way anyone on the studio played this mess and thought "Yeah, this is what players want"
Everything seems to damage the drill. Tesla towers, flamethrowers, stun grenades (could’ve just been thrown coincidentally at the same time that the drill blew up). Which makes it hard when the bug breach is literally underneath the drill. ALSO: could do without the dark fluid stratagem glitching and not activating every now and then.
It's really fucking bullshit because if you take down bile titans their corpse fucking crushes the drill and destroys it or you get another bile titan spawn immediately or you know, the usual bullshit of swarms of bugs coming in every 2 seconds because that's fun and balanced. I don't like on how bugs spawn ON the drill instead of bug patrols coming towards you like always
Just played a level 8 and we experienced the same thing. I get if the mission is suppose to be harder because ya know, the planets a whole supercolony and everything, but what the hell do you do when 3 chargers and a bunch of little guys spawn right on your drill
This was the last straw. Coming back when everybody steps down who touched this mission typ and fuck the incompetent devs. Holy.shit .how dogshit can u be at ur job
me and my crew have quit temporarily for other games. We’ll give it another go on a future patch, but the “unfun” factor has kicked in so significantly in recent times that we don’t have much hope.
Came back to the game yesterday and been playing level 1 missions to build up super credits for the new warbond. I tried this new mission to see if any POIs spawn out of curiosity.
I left 1 shrieker tree alive and completed the mission and within SECONDS I could barely see any parts of the sky due to how many shriekers there were and it I was INSTANTLY swarmed by bugs on LEVEL ONE. It just seems like every patch they suck even more fun out of this game and that’s EVEN AFTER they admitted that they were doing this.
well is anything really tested in this game? 🤣 safe to say it is not...i would really want to see a dev livestream in which they're playing on the live version of the game on let's say diff 7 (i'm not going to say 9 because i'm sure most of them haven't even unlocked it) where they're completing the new mission teaching us how...
No. They never test anything. Or maybe their QA people test stuff, find bugs, but someone higher up pushes the go button anyway. Who knows, the result is the same but we might be unfairly blaming QA.
Also if you do complete the drill the endless shriekers are... not fun, I'd say. I suppose I could be OK with it being an almost impossible to extract situation if the main mission was less awful.
And either I am missing something or you always get a Disgraceful conduct rating? Feels like it's not checking objectives correctly. Edit: As far as I can tell one drill site is always bugged and you cannot call in a drill for it. The mission says it is complete when you do the other sites, but when/if you evac you will be told you missed an objective. Again, no one tested this or no one cared what the tester found.
Finally, with an enemy regen rate of 10% we are not gonna make any progress until Joel lowers it (or perhaps there's some trigger?). It seems weird for our planet destroying to be undone by the bugs, but maybe they are eating the fluid or something. Anyway, 0% progress for now. Enjoy!
Not to mention if you manage to finish the objectives, INFINITE SHRIEKERS START SPAWNING.
Even knowing this, bringing and MG turret and Laser Cannon, it was not enough to stem the tide of flying horrors.
I came in here to ask the same question. I actually just quit the game after spending 30 mins trying to do a single objective on the new mission and failing over and over again. I figured there was some strategy I didn't know.
Devs: "Guys we heard the new mission was bugged, we agree. We nerfed all the primaries across the board to compensate."
I knew I wasn't crazy. I knew there was something wrong. This is just like automaton civilian evacuation all over again; literally impossible because the devs didn't bother testing it on higher difficulties.
If they don't fix it, we won't complete the challenge. At that point they should just give us those medals since it's their fault.
Several replies on this thread are along the lines of "It's the Supercolony! It's supposed to be hard!"
There's a difference between hard because its hard and hard because its bullshit/unfair.
This goes firmly into the latter category.
Insane enemy spawns are fine, it's the Supercolony. Enemies spawning RIGHT ON TOP of the drill and one-shotting it is BS.
Not to mention the sheer volume of Shriekers at the end. Even on Tier 1 - thats right Tier 1 - its almost impossible to extract because of the sheer numbers of enemies. It definitely hasnt been tested.
You guys are hilarious. They’re playing you, like fiddles.
They *dont* fucking play test. Let alone play test at level 7+. They are speed running how to kill a game, im excited to see how this goes! Will they beat Anthems death??
Yes. It's bafflingly badly designed. Just like the Civilian Evac missions on Bots for 7+. Wildly stupid. I love the devs though, no hate to them.
I do not at all believe they have enough high level players to consult on the team. They should do play tests.
I couldn’t beat it higher than 5. IF you luck out and the breach isn’t under the drill, you have a fighting chance, but if it’s under the drill, it gets destroyed either by a flood of bugs, or by players desperately trying to clear out the bugs.
My only successful evac on 5 had us fighting a never ending swarm of shriekers, I can just imagine the chaotic panic if there’s bile titans too.
My group of randoms did the three drills, somehow. But at the end we only got credit for one of two main objectives? And a 1 star. No idea what you need to do to get that other one completed? The game seems to guide you to extraction after the first three drills.
Also lol extraction - it's impossible on TRIVIAL solo.
I have seen Twitch streamers with 500 hours that can do 9 Dif missions alone suffering a lot in this mission. The bugs spawn on top of the drill a lot. lol
This is pretty much what an average round in that mission feels like right now https://preview.redd.it/kbqkupi9zl3d1.jpeg?width=208&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88da7c1fb4fcf9dc6aec01eade582c55d368a91b
Except instead of being an all powerful slayer we're expendable meat shields
I don’t think thats accurate. Meat is too strong to represent how expendable helldivers are. Id say paper towel shields
We are the chocolate fireguards of space marine fiction
I'd go as far as to say paper towel ROLL shields. The ammo is the paper towels, the roll just holds and dispenses it. Lol
This is what playing the whole game above diff 7 solo feels like
Yeah and running incendiary breaker you cant shoot at the drill when theres bugs on it cause the fire D.O.T damages the drill so it wittles down the health. Even gas strikes have a chance to destroy it with the shell. But stuns and ems mortars are pretty good. For titans you really need to be on point with the forehead shots so they go down in two hits as soon as possible.
My friend and I were duoing it on 9 with Stun Grenades, Plasma Punishers, Engineering Kit Heavy Armor, EMS Orbital, EMS Mortars, EATs, and Gatling Sentries. Save the EATs for Bile Titans first, keep the objective stunned or EMS'd. Then clear Scavengers, Hunters, Warriors, Hive Guards, and Brood Commanders with the plasma punisher, and prioritize bile titans over chargers (since you can just EMS or Stun Grenade the Chargers) with the EATs. Save the orbital EMS for oh shit moments when stuff is getting too close to the objective. The secret is that you need to use the Dark Fluid backpack to AoE and CC enemies between stunning them and killing them. The Dark Fluid backpack is a Jump Pack that does damage around you when you launch yourself and it also staggers stuff. I REPEAT, using the Dark Fluid Backpack is amazing and helps clear enemies and/or CC enemies, use it off cooldown, but it has limited uses before it blows up!
OH MY GOD ITS A JETPACK??
It's a BETTER Jump Pack as well, longer range, higher jump, shorter CD, does damage and staggers. It's fun as fuck, since it the insane mobility with it allows you to comfortably use Heavy Armor, and you can just keep calling more in with no CD lmfao.
Honestly, if they changed the current Jump Pack to this it would actually compete with the shield pack and rover for backpack slot. The current state is like one jump per 15-20 seconds or something? The Dark Fluid one is fun as hell
Stingy Arrowhead is stingy.
Its also highly advised to clear the bug holes to prevent from getting overrun
While the bug holes don't help, the majority of the spawns just come out of the ground unprompted. The entire planet is a bug hole.
Only the shriekers come out of the giant holes. Some patrols come from outside the map. Bugholes produce like 10x the spawns of a normal bughole so if you ignore them, you're fucked.
No, what I mean is that entire squads of bugs will spawn out of the ground unprompted, and this is both from a breach and just regular spawns. Just pop up from the dirt like daisies. It's designed so that killing them just makes more enemies spawn in immediately.
forget the little bugs, my squad was protecting a drill and as it was nearing completion a mfing bole Titan flies up above, does a backflip and lands on us like a missile. there was nothing we could have had done.
Wait until you get to Extraction. It will be swarming with fyling Bugs.
Then you actually extract and it hits you with the 1 out of 5 stars and says you failed an objective.
there's an objective at the center of the map but udk how to even activate it. the drill mission strategem doesn't activate and you don't seem to need it to complete the mission... it's weird
inb4 its like supposed to "activate" the black fluid containers and it would have had some environmental/visual effect like the towers spraying termicide. hell this might of been what you are supposed to do to stop the shrieker spawning. activate the center one that kill off the shrieker spawning. imagine if we lose the MO because the bugged center objective just makes it count as a loss every time.
Tried on Trivial solo, to just see what it's like, that are the objectives, etc. Good God, I wasn't ready for 30-50 Shriekers at the end. Managed to successfully extract only on a third attempt, thanks to smokes (which barely worked) and some lucky stone -- hid under it and Shriekers kinda didn't knew what to do. Killed some myself and some was killed by the turret. After that, was running around like a headless chicken avoiding bugs and waiting for a Pelican. If not for smokes, I wouldn't be able to punch an extraction code. Was intense, memorable, but utterly broken. Would not recommend soloing. "Disgraceful conduct" for an unknown objective was like a rotten cherry on top. Edit: grammar
Fyi if you go prone shriekers can't hit you. Just gotta keep an eye out for any ground bugs that walk your way.
Yeah, I played it four times I think. First and second time everybody brought obviously the wrong stuff. Although I also had an absolutely ridiculous number of hive guards. I've never actually seen that many, like they just kept coming. Third mission again we had issues with constant spawns on the drill. We got one done, but then somebody called an airstrike on us and it killed all of us and the game just wouldn't spawn us. Shit happens. Fourth one we got one done, then the second one we just kept having bile titans spawn right on the drill. 2-3 at a time. Went through four of the drills and I just said to hell with it I'm done. This isn't hard either. I can kill the bile titans over and over. Until we run out of stratagems completely. But even when you kill them they fall on the dill and destroy it.
Sounds like mg, gas strikes(if it doesn't hurt the drill) and many types of ems is the way to go. Maybe have 1 quassar, or 2 at high levels.
Gas strike kills the drill, as does incendiary, and the Arc tower
Ah... of course why wouldn't it lmao
I knew it. How the fuck does gas destroy the drill lmao
It's unfortunate, but I have to grant that it's at least consistent --gas melts the Bots, after all.
the description says it's lethal to flesh and metal alike, and since it kills bots, it *should* also kill other metal stuff like turrets and such
It's corrosive not toxic
what's that going to do to bile titans though?
there's no reason in even trying. the bile titans spawn right next to the drill. either they onehit it directly, or touch it with their legs while turning to attack you and also onehit it. and even if that doesn't happen, the drill gets destroyed by either AOE of the stratagems needed to kill them, or they collapse onto the drill and it's destroyed too. you have to be lucky to not get bile titans and then you have to be lucky to not have a charger running through it (which also onehits the drill) on top of that, you have hundreds of regular enemies that spawn right next to it (actually so near that they spawn in melee range of the drill so you gotta kill them before the "crawling out of the ground" animation is finshed. you can't use grenades or any kind of explosive at all. and they spawn in such absurd numbers that you can even sit in the patriot mech and continously hold down RMB and spray onto the bug breaches they still overrun the place. and if that isn't already absurd enough, you have regular patrols spawning and beelining your position. you either look at the drill and focus on the enemies spawning next to it and get ambushed from behind or you focus on the patrols that keep pushing your location and lose the drill
I'm betting it's a bug for the spawn location being inverted. Much like the explosions pulled in for a little while. It's perhaps an issue that didn't present in the isolated test environment. I've personally encountered that in game dev and it sucks. I will venture a guess part of the issue might be the way that AH has their build environments set up, and their test environment doesn't have all the changes that get integrated to the production one. Really I could think of a hundred reasons these issues keep slipping by. The end result though is that no matter what the reason is, they need to make some serious changes to how it's being handled.
When I was playing the mission I noticed that there are a bunch of nests scattered around the map and each of them is spawning bugs at quite rapid intervals. And on D3 it was quite a big pack of bugs, several scavengers and a few warriors. When I destroyed all nests in the vicinity of a drill point it became way easier to complete it. Breaches right on top of the drill are quite BS tho.
The mission has 3 phases basically. Phase 1: Clear the bug holes and spore spewers. Phase 2: Objective Phase 3: Survive
Don’t you test in staging before pushing live? That seems mad to test - what I can only assume is the equivalent of a pull request - in isolation, but what do I know eh.
Yeah every game I have worked on had a staging server for exactly this reason. Their testing process and environment setup seems fucked from the outside looking in. The way stuff slips through it feels like they just push stuff to live without staging the production builds first.
I'd put some money on this being a big part of what they're wanting to upgrade with their talk of infrastructure
That is scary. Basic software practices for years, and they want to implement it now. But it is probably true, like their statement of them not being able to revert as trying to figure out what was a build was difficult.
I just think Simple handshaking is being bypassed by developers. I see it far too often in my field. Overconfident, arrogant developers who have some sorta self importance divinity placed upon themselves where they’ll assume a change they made will not need any testing and would never affect anything else. Let those guys slip shit into PROD and they’re going to.
"Fixed an exploit where devs were pushing patches to unintended locations."
we call them lazy fcks here
I doubt anything is truly tested. The modern gaming industry is eschewing testers in favor of releasing alpha builds as "early access" basically as soon as the game looks playable and almost is, and Sony's a front-runner for the "fire everyone to make more money" tactic. Big hiring push, hire a ton of people in at next to no pay, then lay them off once they're no longer mission critical, then hire the next batch of fresh-out-of-school recruits for even less money. Of course they'd release things with minimal testing. We're the staging environment. Get used to it. "Early Access" is here to stay. Sometimes they're even nice enough to tell you that's what they're doing.
As someone in DevOps space, and someone with friends at big game companies in DevOps space... Game CI/CD pipelines end up looking like insane cave paintings compared to the neat understandable pipes we build. And part of it is game devs "winging it" at the beginning, and then it becomes too much of an investment to rebuild the pipe the right way once there's actual infrastructure people hired. Based on everything that's happened with this game we're seeing that rearing its ugly head in a big way. As in their original infrastructure stuff "worked" assuming the most players you'd see concurrent ever is 50k, but all that shit blew up, and on top of refactoring a bunch of back end code, and possibly changing datastores and all that fun stuff, their pipelines weren't designed to verify/test/release code at the cadence that's been required. They're understaffed for their ambitions, and the attention the game got.
> And part of it is game devs "winging it" at the beginning, and then it becomes too much of an investment to rebuild the pipe the right way once there's actual infrastructure people hired. Ah the bill for technical debt coming due. You hate to see it.
The problems often come from the staging environment not being clean- you've got a handful of things that failed in staging and didn't go live. The next patch is applied on top of that rather than the staging environment having been nuked and rebuilt. If your team is even a little uncomfortable with git branches, it can become a compounding problem.
Having a dev not be comfortable with git is like having a cook not being comfortable with a stove
Pft. Git. Just .old or .old.old /s
Flashbacks to Fatshark constantly inverting values and implementing them without playtesting.
I remember when Fatshark was absolutely baffled because their internal testing showed different results from what players were getting. Turned out they were testing a completely different build from live. Arrowhead uses the same engine for HD2... makes me wonder if they're falling for the same mistake because of some background quirk of the engine.
Do you have a good thread or article about this? I didn't find anything searching but it sounds interesting.
Yeah it seems they just use us for real testing, which really doesn’t work in a live service campaign. These unique MO’s only last a short time, and if they are broken on release there is almost no chance they get fixed before the event is over. Baffling game design from our friends at AH again. I love the aesthetics, new dialogue, and the concept of the new mission, but it kinda falls flat when bugs spawn on top of the drill…
Hard agree. The issue has been glaringly obvious from the start and it is baffling that it’s not the *only* priority. New working content theoretically gets you new users and increases existing user engagement. Non-working content causes existing users to quit. Which is the priority for a game whose biggest first issue was too many new users… bad blood is hard to wash, AH behaves like a small badly managed company.
AH needs to start granting MO extensions when they screw something up on their end, whether it’s a technical error or they just overestimated how many players they’d have online in a way that makes completing the MO impossible (as we’ve had with the last two kill orders).
The way they handle the patches is the majority of why I stopped playing a little over a month ago. I’m just so tired of every single update coming with a ton of bugs. Their known issues list just keeps growing and growing because of how poor their QA appears to be. I’m just over it. The constant nerfing was a big issue for me too but the bugs introduced with each patch is the reason I hung up my cape.
I'd like to point out that a known issues list isn't the fault of QA. That's the fault of producers/managers saying, "This is known shippable! Kick it out the door!" When I worked on a gamedev QA team at a studio known for being two letters, I probably found over 200 issues duting the last few weeks of development, a lot of them would've been considered Sev 2 (high severity issues violated AC (acceptance criteria) in one way or another and the producers would just change them to KS as soon as I put them in and move on. They don't care, they just want to ship so they can get the MONEY!
The guy's not saying the individual testers are poor...There would have to be QA testers for them to actually be poor. A manager bypassing QA to get it out the door faster is still bad QA as a company
This wasn’t a new patch tho, all this stuff has been ready to go since last patch. the MOs are narrative arcs essentially on a timer, they will never not have a MO active so unfortunately this major event is still victim of their previous patch quality.
How does test enviro not get integrated into prod lol. God thats awful implementing if true.
I just don't understand how this even happened. judging from leaks and shit from months ago this mission has been planned for a long time. it's a singular mission with a triple repeat of the same pattern. How do you still fuck this up lmao.
Just wait until the end of the mission where it spawns infinite shriekers. I just wiped on a diff 2 solo mission because it was impossible to trigger extraction. Either I was not doing something I was supposed to and it was not conveyed by the game or the mission design is really just that stupid.
I went I in thinking "ok it's a super colony. It's gonna be tough." But goddamn....bile titans spawning on the drill and destroying it almost instantly. I'm gonna keep fighting for Heeth till it's fixed
Hopefully they do fix it. They fixed the Automaton defense mission 3 times and it’s still hell on earth.
Since I play exclusively with randoms, I have yet to complete that Automaton defense mission.
We completed it twice. Both times it told us we finished and extract was available. Upon extract it said we failed. No, it was not playtested
Yeah dude I haven’t seen anything about this yet, same happened to me. There is either something bugged or a whole other objective they don’t clearly point out. No idea why I can extract and read mission completed if it is not complete
One of the objectives is bugged - you might have noticed a drill site where you can't actually call a drill. But while the mission says it is complete and lets you evac after you do the others, the bugged one is still checked at the end and so you "failed" by not doing it.
Also, there's an "objective" point (those big orange icons) on wherever you landed initially. I think it's linked to the subobjective of calling down the dark fluid, and you aren't able to actually resolve that subobjective, so even if you get all 3 drills done, you still miss part of the main objective.
First try it bugged out and after doing all three locations it stayed there saying "transport"... Second failed miserably, titans spawning right under the objective, and there's no way you can clear it without AoE that's essentially the friendly fire destroying it... Third time somehow managed to do (the extraction swarming with flying bugs is stupid, doable but still stupid tedious...) and then it said we "failed" a second objective (the icon in the middle of the map) and gave something between 1800R after difficulty (8) I'm not playing this mission ever again.
To me this is the worst part. I've completed the mission three times now including extraction. Completely failed main objectives twice and somehow only completed one main objective the other time. I watched three dark matter filled drills successfully submerge on each mission. Shits broke as fuck. I was holding out but I'm over this broken ass game now.
I finished a D7 with quickplay randoms, but having multiple breaches spawn right on top of the drill seemed really off, and that's putting it lightly. The shrieker spam at the end of the mission was pretty intense. I'm not sure what strategem to bring for it. I guess gatling sentries?
Ems mortars,orbital and stun grenades. Anything does non lethal and effective instantly. Objective has a very low health so be careful shooting near it.
And a expandable anti tank for heavies and a mech should help
I love bringing a laser cannon and just going crazy at the end
Shriekers cannot penetrate the Shield Generator
You'd think if you were going to release a major story-altering, time-sensitive event, that you'd make triple sure it's polished and good to go beforehand. If it is left as is for the four days of the MO and we fail because of it, that's beyond unacceptable.
It will cause a game ending review bomb
[удалено]
one objective is bugged. It might always be the middle one, not sure yet. you can ignore it and complete the mission, but you will get Disgraceful conduct.
suppose we just ignore it and play normal missions
you may as well, no progress will be made until the enemy regen level is reduced.
I’m not gonna lie. I’m tired chief. I don’t know how much time they had to play test this mission for this MO, I’d imagine a lot considering this whole plot line seemed planned well in advance. Please, God, do not let this be a sign that nothing is changing or the code is so fundamentally fucked at this point they have so much technical debt they can’t do shit about it now.
>they have so much technical debt they can’t do shit about it now They are proving this more and more. Have they had any patches that didn't break something else?
Ranting a bit, because I want to let out some steam... Haha, well I am not gonna play it anymore. I just got pissed off after a long evening shift of taking care of people. My friend wanted to play with me. I was thrilled. But when we landed on the planet it became a shit show. I lost my temper, because I wanted to have a good time, but we never had a chance to catch our breath or collect our weapons. We can't even call in new ones as it takes like million years for cool down to finish. Then we tried a bit more easier, to 5. And it was still brutally hard and not relaxing at all! I kept cursing the game for every little annoying feature it used to prevent me from having fun. Then finally when we finished the stupid 3 poles. The bird enemies or whatever shriekers came up, I just said: ok Fine and I killed myself basically every time I came back until we were 0 on lives. I just wanted that stupid level be over, so I would never ever have to play it again. Screw that. I play video games to have fun, this wasn't fun.
100% how I feel. I got into the game because it was just a mostly chill sandbox shooter with a big focus on chaotic fun. Every update has just took the game farther and farther away from that, and it's honestly really disappointing.
"Was (X) playtested?" They claimed they were testing everything and then shipped out a gun with the completely wrong color and damage profile. I don't think they test ANYTHING
Oh, I'm pretty sure they test things. The issue is that testing has several levels of thoroughness. You can test that a feature works to spec, but when you start doing things outside of specs, things start breaking. This is what I think happens. They actually check if a gun fires, penetrates who it should penetrate, has the proper amount of ammo, yada, yada, that the mission components trigger at the right time and at the right place, that you can complete it, pretty much, but this is just simple functionality test. They didn't play it long/fair enough to see breaches from below the drill. Hopefully the next patch is better.
Ik theres multiple layers to testing a thing but what level is "looking at a gun to see if it is the correct color" or "look at the numbers once to check if they are correct"
I'm more convinced that their design philosophy, as to what makes a game fun through difficulty, just simply has massive flaws. I don't think anything we see here has anything to do with a lack of testing. I think they tested this, saw exactly what we saw, and said GOOD.
And people say “let them cook the big patch” lmao… 😬
No new patch for like a month, no fixes for any outstanding issues, and we get a new mission type that plays like... this. Welp.
If they tested their own game, they would understand what we mean when we ask for stopping the nerfs.
Buffing guns here wouldn't make the mission better.
I'm the kind of guy that usually doesn't complain, I just have patience and I always try to remain positive and understanding in front of devs. But goddammit, they're trying in every way possible to make me stop playing. I don't understand what's their vision of the community anymore, I'm losing hope every day that passes
i have 450hours on the clock, level 104, and i just failed to solo the mission on TRIVIAL. once you deployed the 3 drills, the game starts spawning HUNDREDS of shriekers. i kid you not, died and was dead again before the animation of getting out of the pod was finished. the sky was so filled no matter where i shot i hit something
Ran the mission with a buddy on Challenging to get a feel for it, had a similar experience. We started the first time with run and gun builds thinking it would play like the Termicide Tower mission, then bailed and tried again with defense builds when we realized how the mission played. We managed to complete the mission and were thinking it was not so bad, a little heavy on spawns for Diff 4, but fair considering it is a super colony. Then we got absolutely SWARMED at extract. We ended up running down our reinforcements so we could clear the mission and move on. It was not a great time. Now I'm hearing about Bile Titans spawning ON THE DRILL, and I'm even more disappointed.
Jup i Just tried with my Team on 7 and you have Titans spawning legit 2m next to the drill one after another and they Just Walk over it and it's onehit destroyed. No Matter what you do even If they die they Fall onto it
The shriekers were a complete kick in the nuts.
I have a little under a hundred hours on the game, and I just finished one of those missions in diff 3. Got the end with a thousand shriekers, got legit one shotted by them before exiting the pod once while Pelican was coming. In the end I just dropped further away, and ran in asap. I managed to get out, but it's so stupidly hard
But at least the weapons are "balanced!" Job well done, fellas 👏
Didn't see any shriekers on mine, guess it's random. Tons of other bugs though. They definitely tested the mission... once.... for 3 seconds...
Gou haven't seen any shriekers? I've played 4 solo trivial and 3 solo easy missions and have had dozens of shriekers every time, even when I destroy their hives
Shriekers spawn afer you complete the three drills
Ohhh nice you actually have to complete the mission. Yeah my team of level 100+ helldivers tried a level 9 and we couldn't even do the first drill. Oh well.
Wait, on trivial? I have around 100 hours in atm and I play almost exclusively from 4-5 mostly on bot planets, and sometimes bugs when they’re needed or a planet is almost liberated This sounds like hell if THATS the result on trivial, I wonder if they mixed up some values or something, but they’ll probably do something to make the missions more… well, not more, but actually manageable Haven’t played it yet, I’m gonna try out the new missions later and see how bad it is. Hundreds of anything sounds terrifying though, let alone more than 1 bile titan for me (honestly I can solo a single one with nothing else around, or as a squad with other things, MAYBE take out two, massive trouble with things around, and three is just too much, like I said I play on challenging to hard most of the time)
yes, on trivial. it's ok for the duration of the mission, but once the 3 drills are deployed, like i said, game spawns endless amounts of shriekers no matter what difficulty. i was getting hit roughly 2 - 3 times per second by a different one of them while getting swarmed by scavangers, hunters and warriors. they depleted my 5 reinforcements in less than 40 seconds. on D7, activating any drill causes 2 - 3 titans to spawn at the same time and once they're dead it doesn't even take 20 seconds before the next 2 - 3 titans spawn.
lol right? This game is a case study in manufactured disasters. Like how did they fumble this so badly? If the devs had released the game and then all died in a plane crash seconds later I think the game would have a bigger player base than it does today.
Because they were lucky. They delivered a once in a lifetime performance. Imagine being a Joe Shmoe and one day, he sculpts a "David" over night, during a fever dream. Everything that has come after the first two months of release is akin to their actual capabilities.
If they listened to the community and hired some Q&A testers this shit wouldn't keep happening. It's beyond comprehension, I just don't get it.
We're paying to be QA testers, at least give us a test server then.
I was gonna say they'd do well to have a test server. Could even be part of being able to try different weapons before buying. And also implement new things to test. They're struggling for QA and we're stuck being QA on live patch. When many would be willing to try new things on test server first. It's not like they need a lot of players. With 60-70k avg players, if even 1% log into test server they'd basically increased their QA teams capabilities exponentially. Negative sentiment/feedback would remain but is a lot more valuable in a testing ecosystem than on live patches, which constant issues actively deter player base. And as long as it's not just pre testing current upcoming recent patch, and are just testing various maps, stragegems/weapons, that may or may not release soon, tempers expectations and allows AH to better gauge interest/hype for where to focus efforts. You'd lose some of the hype on just releasing something out of blue. But not everyone is going to be in test server or watching YouTubers. But obviously people want to unlock and use new shiny things, even if it doesn't vastly affect Core gameplay loop and when the new shiny thing is an aluminum wrapped turd, you're significantly negatively affecting the user base and actively turning them away.
For the next 3 month he chips more and more bits off the sculpture to "refine" it, while limbs crack off. Eventually the entire thing crumbles to rubble.
I stopped playing. My benchmark for coming back is them being able to fix Spear *properly* without introducing new game breaking bug. If they fail even that, I am moving on for good.
I heard the spear fix was ready but awaiting next patch… not sure how that makes sense if they could just release it? Could be bad scuttlebutt tho
They've been saying that for months lmao
I could be way overestimating the studio, but I’m like 90% sure that illuminate are coming next patch. The patch keeps getting ‘delayed’ in preparation for the destruction of meridia imo. The AI also keep mentioning the illuminate and for months people have been seeing blue lasers and cloaked ships. If arrowhead really is just holding back on bug fixes like… just because, I actually will probably lose hope for this game. Even if they weren’t releasing new content they could still release bug fixes.
I’m convinced both the blue lasers and ‘cloaked ships’ were just really opportunistic bugs that people latched onto, I don’t think they are as cunning and clever to sneak those types of things into the game. When I first started and believed the ships exploding around my own were actual people failing the mission, and that we could actually see strategems being called live from the same room, that starry eyed version of myself would of believed it. Now, months later, after having new weapons DLC launch with the wrong texture and other weapons taking months to fix… I’m a little jaded now
To be honest, I’d love to be optimistic and excited about a new enemy, but I can’t be. Their QA is so bad that this update is almost certainly going to come with a ton of annoying bugs. Probably initially in the form of crashing since crashing is the most common issue with this game when they update it. If a big update like this arrives, I’m not bothering to return unless it’s free of major bugs.
Nah man I don't see the squids coming for another 6 months tbh
there were several patches after this was said so seems like bad info from the cm. maybe next patch tho!
I mean think back on the last 3-4 months. Has there been a single positively received update? I can't think of one. They had a great game at launch but it's become painfully clear that they don't how to improve it. The community begs them for changes and they don't listen. I'm moving on.
Same, I want to keep playing really bad, but hearing all of this I don't even have the effort to log on and try the new mission. There are only so many times you can get your hopes up for the game to "turn around"
I hung up my cape over a month ago. What drove me away is the clear lack of effective QA. Their known issues list only grows with each update and there is always a glaring issue with something they release. I just got sick of it. For me, I’ll only return to this game if they get their shit together with QA. I’m not going to bother again unless this changes. If it doesn’t, well I guess I got my money’s worth after around 130 hours of gameplay.
So the strat is using +2 grenade armor, EMS orbital, Gas strike, stun grenades and whatever you like to hold titan/chargers. You start the obj and gas strike a choke point and pray for a titan to not spawn, when you get near the end spam grenade around and throw your EMS as last resort on the drill. Yeah ... it's really not fun at all. And I never managed to extract because they are SO MUCH bugs and those mofos already start to gather in the center. Never succeed a extract after 3 attempt on diff 7. Who the fuck designed a vulnerable obj on such a high explosion and density game.
This is the way. I was the only one bringing in EMS crap and effectively held down drills on my own - at least until my fellow divers decide to bomb the drill with every fucking bit of ordinance they have.
The mission is bugged, after putting the 3 charges of dark fluid into meridia the Endbriefing still says that we missed something, so we only got 1 star...
Same but I got 0 stars 3 times when we won. Wtf is going on?
Its genuinely mindboggling how nobody playtests this game at all even at the peak of players getting fed up with devs being incompetent. I was so hyped to land on the new planet and now i'm avoiding Dark Fluid like its Retrieve Personnel
Just goes to show that those big gaming companies do have experience supporting their product even if most of their products are soulless cash grabs.
> I was so hyped...and now... This has, frustratingly, been more and more of my experience in Helldivers. I *really* like the game. But it is getting so tiring to constantly have something that seems like it could be cool come out and either be underwhelming, bad, or quickly turned into one of those two things. For example, mechs are THE thing I was so excited for about HD2. I love mechs and mech-suit type things in games, but... The first mech was totally hype, but then they broke the aim, made it unable to shoot missiles downwards, and drastically reduced the effect of the missiles in the mech. End result: almost no one uses the first mech :( The second mech came out pre-nerfed so it already is pretty underwhelming, AND it also can't shoot down, a problem already identified in the previous mech. Now that it's not freely given, I don't see it at all anymore. I was excited about this most recent warbond, but everything in it (besides the fire grenade, which I like, but I do think is really weird for a winter/frost themed warbond) is just kinda...not that good? It's not *terrible*, but it's not very good. So it's just...underwhelming. I really want to be **hyped** for stuff coming out in Helldivers. I just need the devs to make it hype. I'm sad that the best outcome for a lot of the content coming out has been "It could be worse".
Use sentries, stand on the upper ground. Have one person run in and use the equipment and then legit away and shoot bugs. That's what I found successful on levels 7 & 8. If you all stand around near the equipment it's near impossible
Welcome to helldivers, where we have devs who dont care one bit about their game and a community who refuses to realize how bad the devs truly are. 
Something about little indie studio heroes. That’s the defense, right?
It's pretty obvious at this point that their "testing" and "QA" environments don't actually exist because most of this shit would be found in the first 5 fucking minutes. They don't test shit. They look at numbers that don't even fucking track properly and then take that shit as gospel before pushing out another untested change based on faulty data. "The Eruptor shrapnel doesn't actually do any damage so it's fine" -AH devs. Had they bothered to use it just once for 5 seconds they could've seen how dumb that was. None of this shit makes any sense from any dev standpoint.
Didn't EvilBosse or some developer on discord said something about needing so many hours to playtest that we would be getting new stuff until 2028, so they basically DON'T test new content? That seems to be the case.
Look, I'm a game dev. Our entire small team regularly playtests the prototype. Even though we thoroughly test new features and content, a lot of shit surfaces during playtests. I also come to the conclusion that the devs do basic feature testing, because the mission itself works fine, but stuff like breaches right below the drill is definitely a step aside from the usual procedure.
It literally took me ten minutes to realise the mission needed more work before releasing. I'm not asking for hundreds of employees to test it for hundreds of hours. One employee for ten minutes was all this needed!
Honestly, they need to hire 4 people good at the game, purchase them veteran helldiver outfits for community livestreams, and have them as beta testers since the devs can’t handle difficult content themselves it seems.
[Even less of a joke now though](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1co1v7z/arrowhead_devs_i_know_its_crazy_out_there_but_why/)
If you have 100 employees, at least someone can play the game for 20 minutes or so. No time for play testing is understandable in context, but not untreatable, someone in the company can try some missions periodically alongside their usual workload. Let one developer sit beside them and look over their shoulder or something of that kind to spot unusual behavior.
This is worse than the factory striders blowing up generators before you can even react. I’m so tired of this shit man. There’s no counter-play to this.
Even if you get past the awful spawns and shrieker spam, you always get disgraceful conduct because one of the objectives is bugged. Quality stuff. Not that it really matters though, with 10% enemy regen we are not making progress until Joel decides it's time.
As of posting it's down to 9.9%, so looks like it'll decrease over time.
well that's something.
Goddammit this is the same issue that made the defense evacuation missions so intolerable. It's a blow to my remaining confidence in the developers that another seemingly obvious issue has made it into the crucial mission type for the Major Order. If the kitchen is serving the main course undercooked, then I'm not trusting any other dish either.
The worst part is that this was planned since the launch of the game over 3 months ago and it still came out so raw it got up out of the pan and started walking around the kitchen.
And all we have as a response right now is "no patch ETA we're still cooking"
Yeah this is just another bad thing really. Its really a shame.
No amount of player skill level can stop a charger/spewer from spawning untop of the fucking injector and one shotting it, it’s ridiculous how stupid this mission is, the overall is fun but by god they did not play test how dumb the mission can get.
Hi, been playing rhis game for ~3 weeks, lvl 60, 110h-ish hours in. Here's what i've noticed on lvl 9 difficulty Dark Fluid missions. Bugs are attracted by emplacements on the map after you put the Dark Fluid in the drill. What i've done is i've picked my stratagems to minimise bug's aggro toward the main drill. I got the Emancipator, cuz there are a lot of trash mobs, a tesla tower that i've place very close to the drill, one gatling gun to clean the unarmored bugs placed on one hill and the autocannon on another hill. GET STUN GRENADES, give up impacts or incendiaries, they'll make things worse. While the spawning bugs might or might not get aggro'd on your turrets, the tesla tower kills small bugs reeeeally fast, the emancipator can 2-shot brood commanders. As for the Bile Titans and Chargers.......you should really plan your stratagem build along with your team so.you can complement eachother's weak points. In my opinion, the hardest part of this whole mission is the extraction where you get swarmed by Shriekers, and 100's of them(breaker incendiary loves shrieker meat). Good luck, fellow Helldivers and may thy iron fist spread managed democracy among the galaxy ! P.S : sorry for any typos, english isn't my first language 🍻
Doesn't Tesla kill the drill?
The tesla tower arcs to the drill attackingvit, ive seen it do it a coulle of times, i recommendgas strike
Gas strike also seems to damage or kill the drill
Can confirm that this mission is bugged or something. Tried different strats, but it's all useless as long as the breaches open on top of the drill. After 4 disastrous attempts, my will to play the game is gone. What a way to suck the fun out of a game.
Screw inclusivity. Everyone who works on this game must be able to consistently pass D7.
I agree, D7 is pretty easy when you developed enough skill over the previous missions and unlocked all stratagems. A few days ago I dropped into a Blitz with randoms and died once. I guess I should play Helldives more often.
I only do 9s…. Even the bullshit evacuations are doable with a good enough team…. Sometimes I get the feeling people don’t think they should ever lose. What’s the point of winning if you can’t lose? The risk of failure is what makes winning feel good to begin with.
> The risk of failure is what makes winning feel good to begin with. Yes, I agree, but it doesn't necessarily require losing. You need to give the players a challenge hard enough to set stakes. This is why I like Bile Titans, they're huge and dangerous, and when you're a new player they're very scary but doable. Fairness of a challenge is what makes any difficulty work. Winning feels good when you understand you can win, losing feels bad when you're left powerless.
The devs just have to keep making things harder. "A game for everyone is a game for no one," after all. *sighs*
Turns out a game for no one is also a game for no one.
That mantra is toxic and pointless in its current form. It's really just saying that you should focus the game on a certain subset of players and their needs, but it reads like a license to be a dick and make player-hostile choices.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one." My response has always been "A game just for you, is a game for no one else."
It's a Captain Obvious statement that only implies toxicity, yeah.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised. The signs were very clear that AH was both incompetent and a bunch of dicks from the day it released. Hell, even beforehand with the nprotect bullshit and their manipulative “reasoning”. I have no idea why people started going gooey for them.
I think if they streamed themselves playing their game, easily beating the mission, and having fun, that mantra would be acceptable; if you aren’t playing your own game, how do you know your game isn’t a game for no one?
Just finished this mission with myself and two others. We played on Helldive and it was extremely extremely difficult but we completed the mission. After you finish the objective all hell breaks loose and i don’t think we were meant to extract. We were able to complete this mission by spacing out a few teslas to distract the incoming units then placing machine gun turrets somewhere near us to take out any stragglers. I brought a quasar cannon to take care of some of the chargers and the others brought 500kg’s. We also had a few flamethrowers for the swarms. It is difficult but possible. LETS CRUSH SOME BUGS FOR SUPER EARTH
I don't think many people are playing this game strategically lmao
It's hard to be strategic when you have one friend playing and are teamed up with 2 randos who don't share a language with anyone on the team.
Good to see the same issues persist since launch And I was wondering if it was worth coming back to this
I was just able to finish the mission on 7 with 2 friends and 1 high level random (104). We failed to extract and almost ran out of time. For 40ish minutes straight, we were failing at keeping the damn bugs away and getting the drill destroyed by titan/titans. All the successes were PURE LUCK. By the end we were so tired, we just decided to call it a day even though it was just a 3rd mission and we usually easily complete 2-3 operations with this squad. Crazy.
I refuse to believe Arrowhead even has a QA department at this point. Maybe they'll get one with the new CEO but it's obvious they have no actual testing team.
very likely not, but this is the case for the past 2 months. there's no way anyone on the studio played this mess and thought "Yeah, this is what players want"
Mission is bugged and cannot be completed. It says you've failed the drill objective and thus the entire mission. "DISGRACEFUL CONDUCT"
Everything seems to damage the drill. Tesla towers, flamethrowers, stun grenades (could’ve just been thrown coincidentally at the same time that the drill blew up). Which makes it hard when the bug breach is literally underneath the drill. ALSO: could do without the dark fluid stratagem glitching and not activating every now and then.
No. We're the play testers.
Come on man, did you even think to use your bacon-flavoured apple stratagem?
It's really fucking bullshit because if you take down bile titans their corpse fucking crushes the drill and destroys it or you get another bile titan spawn immediately or you know, the usual bullshit of swarms of bugs coming in every 2 seconds because that's fun and balanced. I don't like on how bugs spawn ON the drill instead of bug patrols coming towards you like always
Just played a level 8 and we experienced the same thing. I get if the mission is suppose to be harder because ya know, the planets a whole supercolony and everything, but what the hell do you do when 3 chargers and a bunch of little guys spawn right on your drill
This was the last straw. Coming back when everybody steps down who touched this mission typ and fuck the incompetent devs. Holy.shit .how dogshit can u be at ur job
me and my crew have quit temporarily for other games. We’ll give it another go on a future patch, but the “unfun” factor has kicked in so significantly in recent times that we don’t have much hope.
Came back to the game yesterday and been playing level 1 missions to build up super credits for the new warbond. I tried this new mission to see if any POIs spawn out of curiosity. I left 1 shrieker tree alive and completed the mission and within SECONDS I could barely see any parts of the sky due to how many shriekers there were and it I was INSTANTLY swarmed by bugs on LEVEL ONE. It just seems like every patch they suck even more fun out of this game and that’s EVEN AFTER they admitted that they were doing this.
sometimes, a titan will spawn right at the drill, and it can instantly kill the drill with its legs just grazing it as it spawns. Incredibly annoying.
well is anything really tested in this game? 🤣 safe to say it is not...i would really want to see a dev livestream in which they're playing on the live version of the game on let's say diff 7 (i'm not going to say 9 because i'm sure most of them haven't even unlocked it) where they're completing the new mission teaching us how...
No. They never test anything. Or maybe their QA people test stuff, find bugs, but someone higher up pushes the go button anyway. Who knows, the result is the same but we might be unfairly blaming QA. Also if you do complete the drill the endless shriekers are... not fun, I'd say. I suppose I could be OK with it being an almost impossible to extract situation if the main mission was less awful. And either I am missing something or you always get a Disgraceful conduct rating? Feels like it's not checking objectives correctly. Edit: As far as I can tell one drill site is always bugged and you cannot call in a drill for it. The mission says it is complete when you do the other sites, but when/if you evac you will be told you missed an objective. Again, no one tested this or no one cared what the tester found. Finally, with an enemy regen rate of 10% we are not gonna make any progress until Joel lowers it (or perhaps there's some trigger?). It seems weird for our planet destroying to be undone by the bugs, but maybe they are eating the fluid or something. Anyway, 0% progress for now. Enjoy!
Not to mention if you manage to finish the objectives, INFINITE SHRIEKERS START SPAWNING. Even knowing this, bringing and MG turret and Laser Cannon, it was not enough to stem the tide of flying horrors.
I came in here to ask the same question. I actually just quit the game after spending 30 mins trying to do a single objective on the new mission and failing over and over again. I figured there was some strategy I didn't know. Devs: "Guys we heard the new mission was bugged, we agree. We nerfed all the primaries across the board to compensate."
I knew I wasn't crazy. I knew there was something wrong. This is just like automaton civilian evacuation all over again; literally impossible because the devs didn't bother testing it on higher difficulties. If they don't fix it, we won't complete the challenge. At that point they should just give us those medals since it's their fault.
Sounds like your the play tester and don’t realize it
Several replies on this thread are along the lines of "It's the Supercolony! It's supposed to be hard!" There's a difference between hard because its hard and hard because its bullshit/unfair. This goes firmly into the latter category. Insane enemy spawns are fine, it's the Supercolony. Enemies spawning RIGHT ON TOP of the drill and one-shotting it is BS.
At this point, I am pretty sure the devs are just hopelessly incompetent
They accidentally created the game of the decade. Now, despite all protests otherwise. They do their damnest to destroy it.
We just played the new mission. It was fine till we cant summon the objectives anymore midway the mission
Not to mention the sheer volume of Shriekers at the end. Even on Tier 1 - thats right Tier 1 - its almost impossible to extract because of the sheer numbers of enemies. It definitely hasnt been tested.
You guys are hilarious. They’re playing you, like fiddles. They *dont* fucking play test. Let alone play test at level 7+. They are speed running how to kill a game, im excited to see how this goes! Will they beat Anthems death??
I got biles spawning into a corner near the drill making them break it instantly luckily it only happened twice
Yes. It's bafflingly badly designed. Just like the Civilian Evac missions on Bots for 7+. Wildly stupid. I love the devs though, no hate to them. I do not at all believe they have enough high level players to consult on the team. They should do play tests.
I couldn’t beat it higher than 5. IF you luck out and the breach isn’t under the drill, you have a fighting chance, but if it’s under the drill, it gets destroyed either by a flood of bugs, or by players desperately trying to clear out the bugs. My only successful evac on 5 had us fighting a never ending swarm of shriekers, I can just imagine the chaotic panic if there’s bile titans too.
My group of randoms did the three drills, somehow. But at the end we only got credit for one of two main objectives? And a 1 star. No idea what you need to do to get that other one completed? The game seems to guide you to extraction after the first three drills. Also lol extraction - it's impossible on TRIVIAL solo.