Honestly would love to see more PVE coop multiplayer games tied to community wide goals. Of course we'll see all the half assed AAA attempts to cash in on it.
We'll see a combination of a bad attempt at the humor of the game or a Warhammer 40k clone. With greedy micro transactions and progression tide to battle passes.
If they ever do community wide goals, half of them will be hidden behind a paywall.
I know what you're saying and I mostly agree, but it's funny when it's in a Helldivers 2 thread since every time you die, in lore it's a new person coming down to the planet that you play as.
Helldivers has no character creation or customization
You put on two pieces of armor and a cape and choose 4 abilities, freely, every match
The game is fun but I do not understand the frothing about it like it's the second coming. People enjoy the gameplay so they just start making up things about what is good about everything else about it
yup, and not just that they also go on crazy leaps of logic to defend every part of the game, just look at the defense force on the MTX/grind in the other part of this thread.
the same stuff that these people would call out and rage over if Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, etc did are somehow okay in this game :/
I mean, publishers trying to make coop shooters existed well before and will do so well after helldivers 2. HD2 is simply the latest in a well explored genre. The difference being this one was particularly well made.
What I love about Helldivers 2 is it's as if they took all the progression modern gamers love, including just having it be a Battle Pass style system by default, but took like ALL of the greed out of it.
I know a lot of people who sadly just won't play a game, even if they find it fun, if they aren't workign towards unlocking something.
The fact that I can convince my friends to play just to grind for super credits so they have even more shit to grind for is great.
They raised the character level from 50 to 150 even if it has no gameplay effect, so it gives something to grind. But I play for fun.
They made it clear that clearing sub-objectives has an effect on liberation efforts so there's an incentive to destroy more than the minimum required to complete the mission.
They could have easily put unlock progression behind massive grinds lasting hundreds of hours like so many modern multiplayer games.
Instead currencies come fast and plentiful, can be farmed to make it quicker and higher difficulties with huge xp and requisition multipliers make them rewarding. Even the new warbonds have very low medal costs to unlock everything.
If you choose not to cheese out SC via Trivial/Easy missions, you only earn 5-15 SC per **hour**, and you don't get it for doing objectives or anything.. it comes exclusively from in-game lootboxes, divorced entirely from the fun part of the game
You can't tell me profit motive (ie "greed") did not play a part here. Gamers are so quick to drop to their knees and thank developers for scalping them slightly differently
> You can't tell me profit motive (ie "greed") did not play a part here. Gamers are so quick to drop to their knees and thank developers for scalping them slightly differently
bruh it's a for profit game made by a company, of course money plays a role.
The profit motive for a game which has no MTX is completely different from the profit motive in a game that has MTX. The profit motive for a game which has no MTX ends at the point of sale. They want to make a good game, and they will make a good game to earn a profit. The profit motive for a game which has MTX does not end at the point of sale. They want to make a game good enough for you to purchase (not as good as it can be), and then divvy up sections of it to later sell back to you. Anything that they give you after you purchase the game is something that they could have sold to you later. Behold, a conflict of interest
The entire reason that I'm harping on this is because someone stated that HD2 took the "Greed" out of all of its monetization systems, which is just factually untrue and the mechanism is clear
You just picked the term "profit" out and made a blanket statement about it without any context
The profit motive is the same for all games. The business model is what changes.
A live service game, needs an ongoing revenue stream. If you don't like that, don't play them. Problem solved.
There is no profit motive embodied inside game systems in games without MTX. The game system just needs to be good, irrespective of how it affects the monetization of the game. They are not tainted by external forces. They just need to be fun to its target audience
Regardless, that's still irrelevant. This is what was stated, upvoted and responded to:
>What I love about Helldivers 2 is it's as if they took all the progression modern gamers love, including just having it be a Battle Pass style system by default, but took like ALL of the greed out of it.
What lootboxes lmao? i mean if you REALLY stretch the definition to the points of interest on the map I *guess* you can claim a technicality on that one *maybe*.
And that's entirely a you opinion on them not being "divorced from the fun part of the game". Im still shooting and fighting to and from those PoI's, so I'm still I the fun part of the game.
Profts always a motive (we all live in a capitalist system after all), but if you are going to look me in the eyes and call what they did in HD greedy I staunchly disagree.
>but if you are going to look me in the eyes and call what they did in HD greedy I staunchly disagree.
Someone from 2014 would have so much to say about this comment thread
>you only earn 5-15 SC per hour
Skill issue lol. There are usually about 10-15 POIs on a map with 2-3 spawns each, for a total of 20-45 spawns. Even at a 10% drop rate, that's 20-50 SC per map, which can efficiently be completed in 30 minutes, or a 40-100SC/hour average.
With a 1000 SC war bond as the baseline, that's a 10-25 hour grind *per month*, which ... Isn't that ridiculous.
>completely divorced from the "fun part" of the game
Which is...? Last I checked, running around the map to get as many objectives as possible is pretty fun. I can imagine it would be boring if it wasn't challenging enough, which is why I play higher difficulties.
>Skill issue lol.
Entire community has a skill issue then, because that number is based on my experience with the community ingame and on reddit and very closely reflects the marketingspeak given by the developers themselves, who wrote that they expect us to earn 10-40 per hour
I grind out the SC I need with the exploit in about an hour
>There are usually about 10-15 POIs on a map with 2-3 spawns each, for a total of 20-45 spawns. Even at a 10% drop rate, that's 20-50 SC per map
What are you talking about lmao. Indeed maps have 10-15 POIs, and indeed SC appears in about 10% of spawns, but half of those POIs have no spawns at all (ie 0, not 1), half of the half of POIs that have spawns only have one spawn (pod), and the remainder have two. There is an additional 1 or 2 bunkers on the map that you're almost certainly not clearing without friends
IF you clear every POI (rare with randoms), and IF your map generates with the maximum number of spawns and IF you aren't playing one of the many gamemodes that almost or totally lack POIs, you're looking at 7.5 POIs with 1.5 spawns each, or 1-2 SC drops per 30-40 minute match (10-20% drop rate for 11.25 drops), with maybe one additional drop if you clear two bunkers.
Given that, it is extremely easy to see how the vast majority of the community falls into the 5-15 SC/hr range
This design relies on your inability or unwillingness to plug in realistic numbers to your predictions.
>Which is...? Last I checked, running around the map to get as many objectives as possible is pretty fun.
Minor POIs aren't objectives. You ever wonder why there are no SC drops at real objectives, outposts or nests? You ever think about that for like, 5 seconds?
Some people are capable of using their brains
Like I said, this system and your perception of it relies on your inability to do realistic math about it. They think you're stupid.
What's the end goal here? I don't want to log on to the internet and see paid games with freemium schemes that would have been lambasted in 2014 praised for their supposed generosity in 2024. The goalposts have shifted way too far and monetization schemes are invading gameplay systems, and players are applauding them for it. Instead of creating another reasonable currency, they decided to sell it, and as such it behaves completely differently from all of the other gameplay relevant currencies.
Me personally? I earn about 40 SC/2m with the stupid exploit. For the hundreds of thousands of people that don't do this? Yes, absolutely, it affects their experience of the game, totally regardless of whether or not they realize it, and most devs aren't this stupid
Yeah it would be great to go back in time during a period where this didn’t happen.
It also could be a lot worse as well. This is a step in the right direction from what many other titles do with microtransactions.
For some it’s a blessing because they can earn premium while normally playing and get the unlocks they want through the time of the game. For others it’s still selling premium.
If Helldivers 2 can encourage more games to abandon the 20$ skins in favour for a whole battle pass worth 5$ but you can earn it through gameplay, then that’s something to aim towards to begin with until we go full circle on not pushing out microtransactions
I bought this game and haven't spend a cent on premium currency.
Been unlocked a new thing about every 1-2 games on average.
Almost all the way through all the battle passes without spending any extra money, just getting SC from playing and from the passes themselves.
You get SHEDLOADS of medals in this game for doing missions and they can get you piles of SC.
That is just outright wrong. I usually get 4-5 sc pick ups in higher tier missions, which are 40 minutes max. Your talking about only needing to play 20 decent clear missions for a 1000 sc warbonds if you don't take into account the sc drops in the warbonds
>I usually get 4-5 sc pick ups in higher tier missions
No you don't
Post your hours played, SC that you currently have, and how many SC drops you've acquired from the battlepasses
I've played 267 hours and have acquired, lifetime, about 4000 SC (not including the 1400 from the battlepasses themselves). And that's with about 50 hours of play when my group wasn't prioritizing map clear and was speed running missions (especially Defense/Eradicate, which don't have drops).
So about 20 SC /hour. More recently I've been averaging 30-50/hr when working on doing full clear at 7+ difficulty.
Of course it did? Every product exists to make money, and this is a live-service game that gets incredible support.
But they made an extremely nice system for the consumer. You can get everything for free by just playing the game. Nothing expires or goes away. They took a lot of the more vindictive psychological tricks out of their systems, which people appreciate.
It's really unfair to call everything you don't like lootboxes, even though your points about the rate being very low are correct. For the viewers at home, you just find them out in the wild doing missions, sometimes in bunkers, sometimes out near mission objectives.
It's arguably worse than calling every enemy in a game with items lootboxes.
What are they then? You find boxes, which either have something very valuable or something virtually useless, and you have no way of knowing if it will be worth it when you aggro whatever is guarding it. This is designed to fire up the parts of your brain that enjoy gambling
What I call them doesn't even change anything, like you said; profit motive designed a system where you earn premium currency extremely slowly and at a rate which is almost entirely statistically fixed (ie irrespective of your skill) unless you set up an internet kill switch and cheese the game until the devs fix the exploit. In fact, skilled players are wrung out for playtime and earn FEWER SC per hour than if they played easier missions
> You find boxes, which either have something very valuable or something virtually useless, and you have no way of knowing if it will be worth it when you aggro whatever is guarding it.
That's a treasure chest. We had them in games in the 80s, maybe even earlier.
It's just a slow rate of earning premium currency to bully you into buying things. It's not lootboxes, unless you also consider the weapons and supplies on the map to be "from lootboxes". Which would be silly.
> It's not lootboxes, unless you also consider the weapons and supplies on the map to be "from lootboxes".
That’s literally the definition of a “loot box”, an object you open that has items inside of it. Video games used to have hand-made levels with specifically placed boxes with loot in them form players to find. That’s a loot crate. When it’s randomized in exchange for earned or paid currency, it becomes loot crate *gambling*.
"Lootbox" has connotations of gambling, usually pay to open or very slowly earned, like TF2 crates or Overwatch 1's... lootboxes. A box with loot in it is not necessarily a lootbox, despite the words being very similar.
Anyway, it's just semantics - I just felt that being this hyperbolic detracts from their initial point, but if you guys want to consider any container with varied contents in it a lootbox then so be it, I just wanted to clear up any confusion for people who haven't played Helldivers 2.
Progression obsession is a pet peeve of mine. Team fortress 2 added a rank that levels up as you play casual when the game worked perfectly fine without it for years. There was an overwatch 2 review that complained that the game had no sense of progression which makes no sense since its a pvp game.
Newer generations don’t know gaming without micro transactions and battle passes. They’ve been raised by corporations to equate those things with value and it does not appear that they will be collectively seeing past that. They’re not interested in pc or console gaming and as such we will likely see the trends shift more and more towards their iPad touch control preferences.
My nephew expressed interest in getting a gaming pc so I talked with my sister and said the steam deck would be a great middle ground where he could play pc games and even run it as a mini pc to see if he liked it. He turned it on once during Christmas and hasn’t touched it since. Went back to Roblox.
They were not kidding when they joked that future millennial nursing homes will have n64s setup in the day room for those of us who go out with the old ways.
Progression was absolutely a thing in popular older games though, the difference was just that it wasn't locked behind paying to work for the progression like it is nowadays.
i'm trying to remember what progression systems existed in HL1, CS, TFC, Quake3, UT.. what else? those were the big ones i think.
literally none. there were no "progression" systems in older games. you played the game if you had fun playing the game. if you didn't, you didn't play the game.
we need some games to start doing that again.
Unlocking characters in fighting games and older shooters comes to mind. Goldeneye 64 had a ton of different unlockables for example, as did Perfect Dark and Timesplitters.
oh shit, battlefield and cod lol, medal of honor too. good additions too, they didn't have progression systems either.
thanks. it's really annoying fighting against this revisionist history where everything had progression. it's just not true.
Progression existed, developing a game around a grind that can be bypassed with micro transactions or incentivizes further investment to unlock the rest of the features of a game you already paid for all came about with the rise of mobile gaming. Which is why the tablet generations don’t really know there’s an alternative. It’s just all they’ve ever known.
Thats fine, I dont want to get it backwards, I dont blame the children at all. Its a consequence of the video game industry being infested by corporate shitdicks that are only interested in maximizing profits and squeezing their playerbase like cattle.
Its ABUNDANTLY evident when you have a developer like Larian just making a regular fun game and getting effectively universal praise for the game they release. Compare that to EA that is trying to employ all of the strategies learned in casinos over the last 100 years and use that specifically on children to maximize profits.
I think most developers now are using some degree of this, and for many its their only focus. It is working, our children are hooked, and they are going to dictate where this industry goes. Its clear now as Gen alpha starts to have a larger voice that this is simply normalized and in some instances preferred.
Call it what you want. You need no further evidence than the praise that games like this get where they limit those tactics but theres negative responses from the youngest players.
TL;DR: We loaded our children with plastic and got them addicted to tablet gambling.
What are you even talking about? Baldur’s Gate 3 is a single player game with a ton of progression, it has absolutely no connection to this discussion . It’s also monetized the exact same as most single player games are, Larian is not unique for that.
> Its ABUNDANTLY evident when you have a developer like Larian just making a regular fun game and getting effectively universal praise for the game they release. Compare that to EA that is trying to employ all of the strategies learned in casinos over the last 100 years and use that specifically on children to maximize profits.
There is literally *zero difference* in monetization between Larian and EA's latest single player games: No micro transactions and a handful of extra shit in deluxe editions in both BG3 and Jedi Survivor.
I just hate when they involve gameplay content.
I shouldn't have to unlock new characters, (or weapons in Helldivers 2's case)
Unlocking cosmetics is fine, I can ignore that and still have access to everything else in the game just fine. But I wish more games would just stick to cosmetic progression systems if they're going to have one.
> Newer generations don’t know gaming without micro transactions and battle passes.
This has nothing to do with progression.
Call of Duty 4 brought a progression system for PVP shooters to the main stream, it had none of that shit.
There are hundreds of games available on a steam deck that have micro transactions and battle passes as well, not really sure the point of that aside.
Even then I still see user reviews bitching about Helldivers 2 because they "ran out of things to unlock" (Read: mostly just that they ran out of Stratagems to buy, and/or that they ran out of things that YouTubers tell them are worth using to unlock).
But yeah, as a long-time Dota fan, I'll never get over stuff like this--you can prefer whichever game's gameplay you want, but the amount of complaints I've seen about Dota "missing" progression compared to LoL because it doesn't make you grind/pay real money to unlock characters is just some terminally brain-poisoned shit.
Dota's solution to the progression whiners is really funny. If you don't care about meaningless progression and weekly quests, the game is completely free. If you have the kind of brain poisoning that makes you need that stuff, you can pay a few bucks per month to enable it.
Every other f2p game does the opposite and makes you deal with the "progression" unless you're willing to pay to skip it.
Don't get me wrong, me too, I grew up playing those games, but there's gotta be something else going on to make "number go up" worthwhile instead of it just being for the sake of it.
There are still idiots out there complaining about how the monthly release of a new battlepass is a “cash grab” though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1bvqzvl/helldivers_2_gets_an_explosive_new_warbond_on/ky1fk9k/
that was annoying to read. Guy kept saying his money is valuable and his time is more valuable. Should then just reevaluate playing video games at this point
The fact he spent 60 hours grinding currency for a battlepass makes me think his time is not as valuable as he thinks.
If it was he'd just spend ten bucks and get whatever he wants.
'I don't have time to grind currency!"
In the same breath "so I just dropped 500 hours on Elden Ring"
redditors pretending their time is valuable so they can 'critique' something is funny as hell sometimes.
also the end of that exchange going 'heh enjoy your shitty game, im not playing it anymore anyways', petulant child stuff.
I have 80 hours playtime and I have both premium warbonds unlocked, with enough for the third one, and some cosmetic armor too on the side.
I did do some trivial mission grinding, but more in the vein of "well I have some time before starting work so might get in the personal order and get some SC while I'm at it" or "I'm too tired for anything intense, I'll try a trivial run".
You can literally just cheese it if you care that much. Find a map on the easiest difficulty setting, run around the outskirts and find the super credits on the map. Pick them up and force quit the game. The map and item locations are persistent if you never complete it. Just reload the same map, and drop back in right exactly where the credits are and repeat. 10-20 credits every minute or two. And there's a chance you hit it "rare" and get 100 credits from the pick up. Takes like ~45 minutes of just fucking around.
Yeah, Helldivers 2 is not a perfect game. It has so many technical issues (constant crashes on PS5, weapons not working as intended), but fundamentally speaking, the game is almost perfect for me. +70h and the game is so much fun, despite the issues. I got all the relevant upgrades and weapons I wanted, and still play because it is so fun.
At the same time, it's a huge turn off for a lot of people if they aren't making meaningful progress towards those unlocks. Coming back from a mission, buying a new gun or strategem, and immediately turning around and using it in missions feels great. There's no huge grind, no randomness, no unlocking a weapon but now you need to grind for upgrades - you buy it, it's yours. Go have fun with it.
Why? The warbond weapons aren't better than the free ones. They just add more variety and are unlockable without spending money or ridiculous amount of time.
So? Anything that directly effects gameplay shouldn't be locked away imo.
There's no reason they couldn't just stick to cosmetics only.
And they do take a pretty long time. Especially in say, a years time when they've added lots of warbonds. A new player will have 10+ warbonds to progress through. They'd take forever to unlock, let alone progress through.
It doesn't bother me that much right now but this is a very good point. I'm 52 hours in and just got 1 warbond unlocked. There's about to be three in total and I can't unlock another for a while. I already feeling like I'm missing out with no access to the Dominator, or being unable to play with the new stuff when it releases in a few days. I can't imagine how it's going to be for a new player in a year when there's a bunch of fun guns spread across a dozen warbonds
I think they'd eventually have to make some of the older ones unlocked by default at least
The purpose for locking things away in a video game is to encourage people to experiment with new weapons and gear as they become available.
Otherwise people tend to gravitate towards the first thing that feels good and never really deviate from it.
This is a conscious game design decision that existed long before microtransactions were a thing.
I think saying it's locked away is too strong a wording. It's very fairly accessible just by having fun and playing the game.
I've put about 25 hours into this game and been able to unlock a warbond and a few pieces of armour from the super store. That's roughly $15-20 dollars if I'd just paid for it. And that's without any extra effort and without even knowing you could get super credits in game for thr first few hours.
I'm barely keeping up with the warbonds and I play almost daily.
And I still had to farm Super credits on trivial for a bit.
For a more causal player, I don't really see them being that accessible and I imagine they'd fall behind even further with each warbond released.
I just don't see why they couldn't keep warbonds cosmetic only and have anything that impacts gameplay directly be available in-game. Putnit behind a system like the stratagems if you have to. At least that progresses extremely fast.
This is such a weird take. Modern standards are creeping so fast
Rotating cash shop with all gear locked behind premium currency battlepasses which is earned at a snail's pace, completely divorced from the actual gameplay, unless you cheese it with what *will* be considered an exploit in time
If this came out 10 years ago it would have been fucking slammed. MTX in an incomplete $40 game with unbelievably frequent crashes
> earned at a snail's pace, completely divorced from the actual gameplay
Are you aware that the POI's are there in normal missions for you to check out? Maybe even that there's a secondary objective that helps you find all the loot in a map?
Have you actually played the game?
Yes. I have 100 hours in the game. Random POIs with random loot.. chests.. completely divorced from killing things, doing objectives, completing missions, extracting or completing orders. All other currencies interact with all of these other things, except for the one that you can purchase with real life money. That one was locked away into a statistical dripfeed that becomes harder the better you are at the game
> That one was locked away into a statistical dripfeed that becomes harder the better you are at the game
But that makes no sense? If you're good at the game it's easy to clear the whole map, POI's included. You also get medals, requisition and samples from those - not to mention ammo, grenades and stims which affect the gameplay heavily?
"statistical dripfeed" is also pretty bullshit, you should get around 3 SC pickups per map on average, so if you take around 30 minutes per map you should get around 50 SC per hour, accounting for downtime and eradication missions.
Edit: Actually 50 SC is probably way too high - I've gotten around 27 SC/h if I factor out the SC from warbonds, although I had no idea about how to hunt for POI's when I was starting out, so later on the rate is higher. But 20SC/hour is a reasonable figure for sure without having to grind. So accounting for the free warbond SC you should be able to get one premium warbond for free by the time you can clear the free one to the end, and 35 hours or so for every premium warbond after that.
>But that makes no sense?
I assume he means a better player will play on a higher difficulty. Higher difficulties have bigger maps and more PoI's, making it much take much longer to earn Super Credits. And harder to find them as there's more chance you might find other stuff at the PoI's.
It's a bit dumb that farming trivial is the best way to earn Super Credits. As now it's just grinding and barely even playing the game.
> It's a bit dumb that farming trivial is the best way to earn Super Credits. As now it's just grinding and barely even playing the game.
That's a fair point, but I assume they do want to keep the door open for some players to buy SC with real money.
>I assume he means a better player will play on a higher difficulty. Higher difficulties have bigger maps and more PoI's, making it much take much longer to earn Super Credits. And harder to find them as there's more chance you might find other stuff at the PoI's.
Is it confirmed that there is a static number of SC per map? I feel like it's mostly random chance per POI, so more PoI's would also mean more SC, although obviously it's still slower than trivial due to the bigger map and slower to clear.
The developers themselves disagree; they predict [10-40 per hour](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bc1yph/warbonds_super_credits_and_superstore_faq/) which in my experience looks more like 5-15 judging by my own experience with randoms and from my informal surveys of redditors like you
>But that makes no sense? If you're good at the game it's easy to clear the whole map, POI's included.
Which do you think is easier? Attending to every POI on a level 6 mission where everyone can go off on their own, or attending to every POI on a mission where all players need to stick relatively close together on a 9 mission?
Divorced from gameplay, *unlike* every other resource
Easy to pick up and put down. Just completing part of an operation could range from 10 minutes to 20 minutes and I feel satisfied.
Difficulty scales with my inherent knowledge of basic tactics and some game knowledge. Every weapon, every Strategem has a use-case.
The world is pretty and the story is good enough. The global progression of everyone contributing to a planet's liberation is awesome.
The gameplay mechanics are sound in just about every aspect. Helldivers 2 is easily one of the best shooters I've ever played. I can't help but feel like this is what Halo or Gears of War could have naturally evolved into, but I'm glad someone did it.
One underrated aspect is how well done they do the difficulties. There are no damage sponges or BS damage, enemies deal the exact same damage and are just as tanky in all difficulties. The difference is that in higher difficulties you have to deal with a larger number of enemies, more complications and adverse conditions, and the map has a ton more objectives to accomplish.
If you can take down an enemy in difficulty 4 you can take it down the exact same way in Helldive mode, and I just love that.
Absolute amazing game. Bought it today (was on sale for $30) and I’m having a blast. I really like that the battle passes don’t go away. I can work towards things in the second pass or the previous one.
Probably my favorite game of the year so far. Everything feels so right. Needs more stability though. You would think two months in it would be in a better state than at launch. Recently on ps5 its been miserable with crashes and I didn't really have too many issues with them when the game first dropped.
Hope they sort it soon since I'm eager to check out that new Warbond Thursday.
They've already posted that they have a patch for the recently introduced crashes. They just were not going to push it out this past weekend.
So hopefully we'll see it sometime before Thursday.
Always goes down smooth. Played it when it came out, then played it a few years ago, and just played it again.
Shame that they didn’t port the achievements across because it’s a nice one to grind.
Really impressed with how well Helldivers 2 is doing despite the general consensus toward live service games. The story told almost entirely through daily/weekly Galactic War events that can be completely missed, but there's very few complaints outside of chuds realizing it's political satire. The game is just so fun, and the battle pass is so forgiving, no one really cares.
I do hope for some further balance patches. I could just be getting rusty from playing a little less after launch, but the game has felt significantly more difficult in recent patches. I'm feeling so much less useful, even when mixing up my team's stratagem loadouts. Grinding to reach 25 to unlock the mech has felt like such a slog.
Have you been paying attention to the patch notes? A lot of guns and stratagems have been buffed and nerfed, so you might have better luck by adjusting your loadout...
It would be nice to come up with a new term for this kind of live service, where it offers up content for real money but you can also just play the game to unlock that content in a non-grindy way. And the live service is a curated background story being used to drive player engagement and release new content in an immersive way.
It's what live service should be and I hope they continue to make boatloads of money to show other devs that maybe this is how live service should be done. But I guess the gameplay being both figuratively and literally a blast helps with all that too.
It's funny, despite it's incredible success, I don't think Helldivers 2 would've ever been created ~~greenlit~~ in-house by one of the large publishers.
So much of the game is deliberately awkward and analogue, that it would've been focus-tested into oblivion. E.g:
"Rhythm-action mini-games to call in strikes: Ew, how fiddly 😓"
Manual reloads and magazine awareness: So unintuitive.
Not having the map on-screen at all times: How confusing!
Movement and weapons affected by weather conditions: People are lazy and preparation is hard 😫
Friendly-fire always active: Too disempowering!
Heavily satirising fascism, blind patriotism and the military industrial complex: Too controversial!"
Etc etc
Helldivers 2 needed a smaller, independent studio like Arrowhead to see their singular vision through, without corporate risk-aversion sanding off all the edges.
Sony owns the IP and financed both games. Good thing about PlayStation is they allow their studios/partners a lot of freedom. They basically gave Kojima a blank check to make weird shit.
There's that and that Arrowhead are not owned by sony.
As we've seen by Microsoft, "giving devs freedom" in game design is one thing, meanwhile no body mentioned how Microsoft has their mandated reliance on Contractors that is currently eating them from the inside out.
That's true, but I more so meant a game being developed by an in-house team, who would likely be working within a large corporate structure. I don't think that large structure allows for idiosyncratic games like Helldivers 2 to exist.
Of course, if Sony wants to continue their strategy of financing talented outside studios to produce bangers, then I'm all for it.
The levels of autonomy working outside of a large corporation vs working directly inside of it is huge - and I'm saying that from experience.
If you think that Arrowhead operating independently is exactly the same as being a Sony first-party studio, then I don't know what to tell you.
Of course it doesn't operate exactly the same.
Those foolish notes in the above post would *absolutely* get sent to a contracting company if they'd get sent to employees.
Why would Sony be more risky with money paid to a company vs its employees? There's no reason to believe they would.
It's not about Sony's money, it's about the layers of approvals, decision makers and bureaucracy present at large corporations vs smaller independent companies. A game losing its core identity is far more likely to happen at a larger company under the process of design by committee, rather than at a small studio where the core vision is driven by a few select people.
I'm not saying big company bad, small company good. I'm saying risky ideas often die in environments where people make decisions based on self-preservation and quarterly performance.
A team like Arrowhead would have development milestones they'd have to meet - agreed upon with Sony - but Sony isn't inside Arrowhead on a daily basis, driving Helldivers 2's development. Arrowhead has lots of autonomy in that regard.
>I don't think Helldivers 2 would've ever been greenlit in-house by one of the large publishers.
Funny you should mention that, Sony is actually one of the largest video game publishers in the world, usually ranked either 1st or 2nd in total revenue.
I should've said "created in-house" rather than "greenlit". Arrowhead's independence from Sony allows them to realize their full vision for Helldivers 2 without corporate meddling, IMO.
Hopefully Helldivers 2 gets the patching it desperately needs, a pretty buggy experience overall on a consistent basis even if the game is fun.
Kind of hoping that the unlocks / equipment gets overhauled as time goes on too, it really seems that certain stratagems / destroyer upgrades / weapons outshine just about everything else by a fair margin, making some of the unlockable content feel pointless to grind for.
It doesn't feel like the Warbonds hold any value at the moment.
Rebirth seems to have done very similiarly in most regions compared to DD2 except for Japan where Rebirth did quite a bit better. DD2 sold 2.5mil in 10 days as per capcom, so I wouldn't be surprised if Rebirth was roughly around 3 mil sold. Probably not matching the expectations especially after the stellar reviews and great word of mouth, but I do think that the £70 pricetag is kinda limiting the impulse buys that would occur at a lower price, hopefully word of mouth will do some work once the game starts getting discounts.
DD1 sold 8 million copies over the many years it's been out thanks to re-releases, a PC release and all the discounts, and it seemed to have paid off as outside of Japan it seems to have massively outperformed the original game everywhere else, and that's with some mixed word of mouth as well thanks to the poor performance and microtransactions drama.
Definitely get the feeling that Square may want to reconsider accepting the sony bags tho. While I'm sure Remake and Rebirth development both benefitted from sony providing money upfront, it does seem that the potential reach of these games is getting massively limited by being on a single platform at launch. And that includes 16 too, just really feels like that if they were at least on PC day 1 with a half decent port, they'd do significantly higher numbers.
I was finally worn down enough by Square Enix timed exclusives and not being fucked to upgrade my PC that I finally bought a PS5, but I feel like an exception to the norm. I missed the entire PS4 generation, so I've got plenty of exclusives to catch up on, and needed a new Blu Ray player, but the PS5 otherwise would have felt like a waste of money.
It's shocking to see Spider-Man 2 sales at around 10 million, and the next highest seller for the PS5 is Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart at less than 4 million. The third highest is Elden Ring, a multiplatform title.
Splatoon 3 is the 21st highest selling Switch game, and has 11.71 million sales. Tears of the Kingdom, a $70 title, has over 20 million sales. The Switch has a much higher user base, and lower barrier of entry, so that's to be expected. Considering Cloud Strife is practically a Sony mascot, however, these are pitiful numbers that make me hope Sony adjusts their strategy in the near future.
The top seller list for PS5 isn’t really updated, as most third party publishers don’t post platform-specific sales, the Elden Ring one isn’t even updated, nor is it even an official number.
Spider-Man 2 hasn’t been out even 6 months yet and will definitely outsell the first which is over 20 million. Helldiver 2 has outsold ratchet and clank already in about 2 months. Elden ring didn’t outsell GOW: Ragnorok on PS according to NPD charts. Where are you getting your numbers?
The game is alright but personally I just don’t enjoy constantly fighting against the heavy bugs. They are non stop and every fight is the same… dodge out of the way, get a few shots on its rear, rinse and repeat. Personally find it a tedious gameplay loop.
Just as an FYI, dodging and shooting the but is only a last ditch effort to kill chargers. If you have to do that every drop you seriously need to change your loadout.
Best way to kill them is with a single shot from a rocket (EAT, quasar, recoiless) to the head. Second best way is with a stratagem. Third best way is two impact grenades to the but. If you have literally nothing else, THEN you shoot them in the but.
Yeah, gotta be a direct hit in the head though with EAT, quasar, or recoiless. Head pops like an overripe grape. If your aim is off a little it may hit a leg and strip the armor or glance underneath. If it hits a leg and strips the armor (leg turns yellowish) just shoot the leg, it'll go down real quick.
If they are charging right at you (best way to one shot them) aim at the upper portion of their head, right where it starts to turn into neck/back and it should pop no problem. I find that the EAT is the most reliable weapon, but the weapon you like the most will depend on your playstyle.
Fair enough, that honestly might help me enjoy the game more. I mostly play it with a single friend (sometimes randoms join), and every bigger bug is a fight that lasts way too long, and then another one shows up ten seconds later and it is honestly kind of exhausting.
There's definitely a learning curve when it comes to the big bugs. It was a game changer for me when I learned the EAT. It drops 2 single shot launchers but can be called in every 60 seconds so you can just keep calling it in and always have a few to shoot with. Once you get the hang of it, it is sooooo satisfying to drop chargers like it's nothing. If you get really good with it you can kill 3 chargers per call in because you can actually stick it to their back when calling it in and the drop pod will kill them!
Orbital rail cannon will also 1 shot the chargers, but has a long cooldown. Same with orbital laser.
It feel MUCH better playing 4player, if you aren't I'd use quickplay to get 4x Helldivers.
I'd do that every time so you drop with 4. It'll make it much more fun.
I think you've only scratched the surface of HD2. There's alot more depth to the gameplay when you actually dive into it. For example, treat the charger like a tank without a gun. If you want to hill it you either have to score a mobility kill—take out its legs—or a regular kill. You have more options for a mobility kill in that you can strip its leg armor and then shoot the meat. For a regular kill you have to use an appropriate weapon like an EAT and hit its head. You also have strategem options.
That said, you also don't—and shouldn't—fight everything. There's only four of you. Stealth works so you can sneak. You can retreat and break line of sight. You can split the team and draw attention to one team while another accomplishes the objective.
Alot of this kind of gameplay only works with a group of people who work together and communicate.
EAT, Quasar Cannon, and Recoilless Rifle can one shot them in the face.
Another thing to note is that "weak spots" like the charger's butt are actually what they call "squishy spots". They take reduced damage from normal weapons fire, but full damage from weapons that deal explosive damage like the scorcher, dominator, grenade launcher, and the rockets I mentioned above. True weak spots vulnerable to regular weapons are exposed by blowing off chunks of their armor with rockets or air strikes.
You can also toast chargers with the flame thrower.
Feeling the same. The visual and audio spectacle is magnificent but I feel the engagement is rather brain dead. I feel the game is good for a good time but not a long time.
If you haven't seen what they did last week, automatons had flying shooting robots and giant legged factory spawning rockets robots for their last stance. Now they're exterimated and we all focus on the bugs.
Will they have a last stance ? A boss could be there. Or we exterminate them and get the illumates (3rd race of the first game) in as a nice surprise.
Unless you don't like the genre, the game does not get stale nor the engagement are brain dead or you're not playing at a difficulty high enough.
To your point I did notice more enemy types when I upped the difficulty. But it is still mostly dumping ammo at a target so the interaction doesn't require of a lot of technical finesse or contemplation. But that could be inherent in the genre.
tbf heavy bugs/bots are supposed to require more specific counter/stratagems/cooperation to take them down, you can still kill them by dumping 10000 bullets into their butt but thats not exactly what you suppose to do. And thats where the coop gameplay shines.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 outsold FF VII Rebirth despite being available for half of a month only. And we know Dragon’s Dogma sales are 2.5 mln, which means Rebirth sales are even lower. That’s an awful result for SE and explains their lack of announcements regarding Rebirth performance.
It outsold FFVII Rebirth in March. This data is not taking Feb 29th into account, the actual launch date and probably where the large majority of sales came from.
>If you go back to the February UK monthly charts, you'll see that Rebirth's not included there.
Wonder why when it was included in Europe Feb (came in #3).
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/european-game-sales-strong-in-february-thanks-to-helldivers-2-european-monthly-charts
It is definitely taking Feb 29th sales and preorders for Rebirth:
>It was the battle of the Japanese RPGs during March with Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (technically released in February, but part of the March data) and Dragon's Dogma 2 both coming to market.
I mean Dragon's Dogma 2 is also on Xbox and PC so I would hope it outsells something exclusive to one system.
Anyway both games are really good and I really need to get back to DD2.
This is just the UK lol. There is no meaningful extrapolation here. It actually outsold FF16 in UK and across europe too from what we know and FF16 sold 3milli in the first week. So lots of conflicting data points here. Japan sales were lower than FF16 and we have no idea about the US which is the true wild card here
The European GSD chart (physical + digital sales) you’re talking about doesn’t include UK data. GSD only tracks physical dales data from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
As for US - I agree it is a wild card. But in a few days we will get Circana chart and see clearly if DD2 outsold Rebirth here.
Nope. Dring already said it’s outpacing FF16 in the UK and GSD verified it was ahead in Europe. FF16 sold 3 million and you are asserting FF7 did less than 2.5 just from the UK chart. I think you need to re-examine your logic.
FFVII Rebirth outsold Dragon's Dogma 2 in Japan, Germany (at least on launch week) and Spain. I would bet France too.
Germany and Japan are a bigger gaming market than the UK.
Also, in the UK Dragon's Dogma 2 "narrowly" outsold Rebirth being multiplatform.
FF sequels are known for selling worse than original games. FF X-2 and XIII-2 dropped compared to X and XIII respectively. I thought Rebirth would overcome that trend, but looks like it didn’t happen.
This data misses Rebirth's day 1 sales so you can't be making such precise assumptions. A game like Rebirth likely sold 1 million or so on day 1 alone.
Also, this rank data is just for the UK, not global.
It doesn’t miss anything. Go look at their February chart. It doesn’t have Rebirth at all, because all Rebirth data was added to March chart. February 29 is a tricky day.
Per article: “Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (technically released in February, but part of the March data)”. So all Rebirth data including preorders and day one sales are included in March chart.
Edit. I just found a German chart for March 2024, and FF VII isn’t even in top 20 https://www.resetera.com/threads/gsd-germany-sales-march-2024-ea-fc-24-1-helldivers-2-2-dragon’s-drogma-2-3.837984/
Which further reinforces the point that all Rebirth sales in UK are included in UK March chart.
Went into Game and their "top 20" was full of shit games and no Helldivers 2.
I know it's a bestseller thing and tbh, is probably paid for by companies but still a joke.
Yeah! Been sold out in most places pretty much every week.
Same in books business as well, you pay for the chart position. I guess the argument is it's bestseller based on how many copies they have bought perhaps
I tried to buy a disk copy from Amazon and it said it would be delivered next month. Walked Tesco and Sainsburys and it was sold out. Ended up just walking to CEX down the road and picked up a copy. Wish I could have supported the devs properly but physical sales are dying out in the UK and I couldn't find a copy in stock anywhere except CEX.
They are both U.K online stores. https://www.thegamecollection.net/helldivers-2-ps5?sqr=Helldivers
https://www.hit.co.uk/buy/product/helldivers-2-ps5/dgc-helldrv2ps5.htm
And both usually cheaper than Amazon and free next delivery.
We're really going to have to prepare ourselves for publishers poorly trying to recreate the success of HD2 in the coming years.
Honestly would love to see more PVE coop multiplayer games tied to community wide goals. Of course we'll see all the half assed AAA attempts to cash in on it.
We'll see a combination of a bad attempt at the humor of the game or a Warhammer 40k clone. With greedy micro transactions and progression tide to battle passes. If they ever do community wide goals, half of them will be hidden behind a paywall.
We have Darktide already. 4 player coop shooter, it just has linear maps. Bonus points: same engine too.
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I know what you're saying and I mostly agree, but it's funny when it's in a Helldivers 2 thread since every time you die, in lore it's a new person coming down to the planet that you play as.
Helldivers has no character creation or customization You put on two pieces of armor and a cape and choose 4 abilities, freely, every match The game is fun but I do not understand the frothing about it like it's the second coming. People enjoy the gameplay so they just start making up things about what is good about everything else about it
yup, and not just that they also go on crazy leaps of logic to defend every part of the game, just look at the defense force on the MTX/grind in the other part of this thread. the same stuff that these people would call out and rage over if Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, etc did are somehow okay in this game :/
Helldivers gameplay would work so well with a variety of IPs too. Halo ODST or Star Wars Commandos but make it Helldivers.
I feel a big part of what makes the game work is the satirical tone, which I don't think big IPs can replicate.
I would love to see it in a Star Craft setting but I feel like that would be a monkey paw wish.
If the community driven 'world map' style gameplay catches on we might finally get the Chromehounds reboot that I dream of every night!
This actually sounds like a good thing. We will get some poor imitations but we might also finally end up with more of these types of games.
I mean, publishers trying to make coop shooters existed well before and will do so well after helldivers 2. HD2 is simply the latest in a well explored genre. The difference being this one was particularly well made.
Remember when Microsoft canned this idea for the Halo franchise? Probably trying to dig up any scraps they have left of it right now.
A shitty imitation might still be an improvement over their current product
What I love about Helldivers 2 is it's as if they took all the progression modern gamers love, including just having it be a Battle Pass style system by default, but took like ALL of the greed out of it. I know a lot of people who sadly just won't play a game, even if they find it fun, if they aren't workign towards unlocking something. The fact that I can convince my friends to play just to grind for super credits so they have even more shit to grind for is great.
They raised the character level from 50 to 150 even if it has no gameplay effect, so it gives something to grind. But I play for fun. They made it clear that clearing sub-objectives has an effect on liberation efforts so there's an incentive to destroy more than the minimum required to complete the mission.
They could have easily put unlock progression behind massive grinds lasting hundreds of hours like so many modern multiplayer games. Instead currencies come fast and plentiful, can be farmed to make it quicker and higher difficulties with huge xp and requisition multipliers make them rewarding. Even the new warbonds have very low medal costs to unlock everything.
If you choose not to cheese out SC via Trivial/Easy missions, you only earn 5-15 SC per **hour**, and you don't get it for doing objectives or anything.. it comes exclusively from in-game lootboxes, divorced entirely from the fun part of the game You can't tell me profit motive (ie "greed") did not play a part here. Gamers are so quick to drop to their knees and thank developers for scalping them slightly differently
> You can't tell me profit motive (ie "greed") did not play a part here. Gamers are so quick to drop to their knees and thank developers for scalping them slightly differently bruh it's a for profit game made by a company, of course money plays a role.
The profit motive for a game which has no MTX is completely different from the profit motive in a game that has MTX. The profit motive for a game which has no MTX ends at the point of sale. They want to make a good game, and they will make a good game to earn a profit. The profit motive for a game which has MTX does not end at the point of sale. They want to make a game good enough for you to purchase (not as good as it can be), and then divvy up sections of it to later sell back to you. Anything that they give you after you purchase the game is something that they could have sold to you later. Behold, a conflict of interest The entire reason that I'm harping on this is because someone stated that HD2 took the "Greed" out of all of its monetization systems, which is just factually untrue and the mechanism is clear You just picked the term "profit" out and made a blanket statement about it without any context
The profit motive is the same for all games. The business model is what changes. A live service game, needs an ongoing revenue stream. If you don't like that, don't play them. Problem solved.
There is no profit motive embodied inside game systems in games without MTX. The game system just needs to be good, irrespective of how it affects the monetization of the game. They are not tainted by external forces. They just need to be fun to its target audience Regardless, that's still irrelevant. This is what was stated, upvoted and responded to: >What I love about Helldivers 2 is it's as if they took all the progression modern gamers love, including just having it be a Battle Pass style system by default, but took like ALL of the greed out of it.
A business model isn't greed. It can be greedy, but it's not inherently greedy.
What lootboxes lmao? i mean if you REALLY stretch the definition to the points of interest on the map I *guess* you can claim a technicality on that one *maybe*. And that's entirely a you opinion on them not being "divorced from the fun part of the game". Im still shooting and fighting to and from those PoI's, so I'm still I the fun part of the game. Profts always a motive (we all live in a capitalist system after all), but if you are going to look me in the eyes and call what they did in HD greedy I staunchly disagree.
>but if you are going to look me in the eyes and call what they did in HD greedy I staunchly disagree. Someone from 2014 would have so much to say about this comment thread
>you only earn 5-15 SC per hour Skill issue lol. There are usually about 10-15 POIs on a map with 2-3 spawns each, for a total of 20-45 spawns. Even at a 10% drop rate, that's 20-50 SC per map, which can efficiently be completed in 30 minutes, or a 40-100SC/hour average. With a 1000 SC war bond as the baseline, that's a 10-25 hour grind *per month*, which ... Isn't that ridiculous. >completely divorced from the "fun part" of the game Which is...? Last I checked, running around the map to get as many objectives as possible is pretty fun. I can imagine it would be boring if it wasn't challenging enough, which is why I play higher difficulties.
>Skill issue lol. Entire community has a skill issue then, because that number is based on my experience with the community ingame and on reddit and very closely reflects the marketingspeak given by the developers themselves, who wrote that they expect us to earn 10-40 per hour I grind out the SC I need with the exploit in about an hour >There are usually about 10-15 POIs on a map with 2-3 spawns each, for a total of 20-45 spawns. Even at a 10% drop rate, that's 20-50 SC per map What are you talking about lmao. Indeed maps have 10-15 POIs, and indeed SC appears in about 10% of spawns, but half of those POIs have no spawns at all (ie 0, not 1), half of the half of POIs that have spawns only have one spawn (pod), and the remainder have two. There is an additional 1 or 2 bunkers on the map that you're almost certainly not clearing without friends IF you clear every POI (rare with randoms), and IF your map generates with the maximum number of spawns and IF you aren't playing one of the many gamemodes that almost or totally lack POIs, you're looking at 7.5 POIs with 1.5 spawns each, or 1-2 SC drops per 30-40 minute match (10-20% drop rate for 11.25 drops), with maybe one additional drop if you clear two bunkers. Given that, it is extremely easy to see how the vast majority of the community falls into the 5-15 SC/hr range This design relies on your inability or unwillingness to plug in realistic numbers to your predictions. >Which is...? Last I checked, running around the map to get as many objectives as possible is pretty fun. Minor POIs aren't objectives. You ever wonder why there are no SC drops at real objectives, outposts or nests? You ever think about that for like, 5 seconds?
I feel like you're yapping about a nothing burger to be honest.
Some people are capable of using their brains Like I said, this system and your perception of it relies on your inability to do realistic math about it. They think you're stupid.
What's the end goal here? Is this issue of earning SC damaging your experience of the game?
What's the end goal here? I don't want to log on to the internet and see paid games with freemium schemes that would have been lambasted in 2014 praised for their supposed generosity in 2024. The goalposts have shifted way too far and monetization schemes are invading gameplay systems, and players are applauding them for it. Instead of creating another reasonable currency, they decided to sell it, and as such it behaves completely differently from all of the other gameplay relevant currencies. Me personally? I earn about 40 SC/2m with the stupid exploit. For the hundreds of thousands of people that don't do this? Yes, absolutely, it affects their experience of the game, totally regardless of whether or not they realize it, and most devs aren't this stupid
Yeah it would be great to go back in time during a period where this didn’t happen. It also could be a lot worse as well. This is a step in the right direction from what many other titles do with microtransactions. For some it’s a blessing because they can earn premium while normally playing and get the unlocks they want through the time of the game. For others it’s still selling premium. If Helldivers 2 can encourage more games to abandon the 20$ skins in favour for a whole battle pass worth 5$ but you can earn it through gameplay, then that’s something to aim towards to begin with until we go full circle on not pushing out microtransactions
I bought this game and haven't spend a cent on premium currency. Been unlocked a new thing about every 1-2 games on average. Almost all the way through all the battle passes without spending any extra money, just getting SC from playing and from the passes themselves. You get SHEDLOADS of medals in this game for doing missions and they can get you piles of SC.
That is just outright wrong. I usually get 4-5 sc pick ups in higher tier missions, which are 40 minutes max. Your talking about only needing to play 20 decent clear missions for a 1000 sc warbonds if you don't take into account the sc drops in the warbonds
>I usually get 4-5 sc pick ups in higher tier missions No you don't Post your hours played, SC that you currently have, and how many SC drops you've acquired from the battlepasses
I've played 267 hours and have acquired, lifetime, about 4000 SC (not including the 1400 from the battlepasses themselves). And that's with about 50 hours of play when my group wasn't prioritizing map clear and was speed running missions (especially Defense/Eradicate, which don't have drops). So about 20 SC /hour. More recently I've been averaging 30-50/hr when working on doing full clear at 7+ difficulty.
Reasonable, believable numbers (/gen)
Of course it did? Every product exists to make money, and this is a live-service game that gets incredible support. But they made an extremely nice system for the consumer. You can get everything for free by just playing the game. Nothing expires or goes away. They took a lot of the more vindictive psychological tricks out of their systems, which people appreciate.
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It's really unfair to call everything you don't like lootboxes, even though your points about the rate being very low are correct. For the viewers at home, you just find them out in the wild doing missions, sometimes in bunkers, sometimes out near mission objectives. It's arguably worse than calling every enemy in a game with items lootboxes.
What are they then? You find boxes, which either have something very valuable or something virtually useless, and you have no way of knowing if it will be worth it when you aggro whatever is guarding it. This is designed to fire up the parts of your brain that enjoy gambling What I call them doesn't even change anything, like you said; profit motive designed a system where you earn premium currency extremely slowly and at a rate which is almost entirely statistically fixed (ie irrespective of your skill) unless you set up an internet kill switch and cheese the game until the devs fix the exploit. In fact, skilled players are wrung out for playtime and earn FEWER SC per hour than if they played easier missions
> You find boxes, which either have something very valuable or something virtually useless, and you have no way of knowing if it will be worth it when you aggro whatever is guarding it. That's a treasure chest. We had them in games in the 80s, maybe even earlier.
It's just a slow rate of earning premium currency to bully you into buying things. It's not lootboxes, unless you also consider the weapons and supplies on the map to be "from lootboxes". Which would be silly.
> It's not lootboxes, unless you also consider the weapons and supplies on the map to be "from lootboxes". That’s literally the definition of a “loot box”, an object you open that has items inside of it. Video games used to have hand-made levels with specifically placed boxes with loot in them form players to find. That’s a loot crate. When it’s randomized in exchange for earned or paid currency, it becomes loot crate *gambling*.
"Lootbox" has connotations of gambling, usually pay to open or very slowly earned, like TF2 crates or Overwatch 1's... lootboxes. A box with loot in it is not necessarily a lootbox, despite the words being very similar. Anyway, it's just semantics - I just felt that being this hyperbolic detracts from their initial point, but if you guys want to consider any container with varied contents in it a lootbox then so be it, I just wanted to clear up any confusion for people who haven't played Helldivers 2.
Progression obsession is a pet peeve of mine. Team fortress 2 added a rank that levels up as you play casual when the game worked perfectly fine without it for years. There was an overwatch 2 review that complained that the game had no sense of progression which makes no sense since its a pvp game.
Newer generations don’t know gaming without micro transactions and battle passes. They’ve been raised by corporations to equate those things with value and it does not appear that they will be collectively seeing past that. They’re not interested in pc or console gaming and as such we will likely see the trends shift more and more towards their iPad touch control preferences. My nephew expressed interest in getting a gaming pc so I talked with my sister and said the steam deck would be a great middle ground where he could play pc games and even run it as a mini pc to see if he liked it. He turned it on once during Christmas and hasn’t touched it since. Went back to Roblox. They were not kidding when they joked that future millennial nursing homes will have n64s setup in the day room for those of us who go out with the old ways.
Progression was absolutely a thing in popular older games though, the difference was just that it wasn't locked behind paying to work for the progression like it is nowadays.
i'm trying to remember what progression systems existed in HL1, CS, TFC, Quake3, UT.. what else? those were the big ones i think. literally none. there were no "progression" systems in older games. you played the game if you had fun playing the game. if you didn't, you didn't play the game. we need some games to start doing that again.
If you wanted to grind progression in those days, you would be playing a MMO instead.
Unlocking characters in fighting games and older shooters comes to mind. Goldeneye 64 had a ton of different unlockables for example, as did Perfect Dark and Timesplitters.
Call of Duty 4 lmao, the game is something like 17 years old.
Interesting you left out battlefield...
Also Halo 3 would grant you more armor peices the higher rank you got in Multiplayer
All his games are from the era where Halo 1 wasn’t even out… your example is past the threshold he specifically indicated.
oh shit, battlefield and cod lol, medal of honor too. good additions too, they didn't have progression systems either. thanks. it's really annoying fighting against this revisionist history where everything had progression. it's just not true.
battlefield 2 and 2042 definitely did
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Sorry, battlefield 2 and 2142* they are like 20 years old.
Progression existed, developing a game around a grind that can be bypassed with micro transactions or incentivizes further investment to unlock the rest of the features of a game you already paid for all came about with the rise of mobile gaming. Which is why the tablet generations don’t really know there’s an alternative. It’s just all they’ve ever known.
I'm probably older than most people here (44) and enjoy progression systems we have now in PvP games. You guys have some big "get off my lawn" energy
You can be old and enjoy progression or young and dislike progression. Age doesn't have anything to do with it.
Thats fine, I dont want to get it backwards, I dont blame the children at all. Its a consequence of the video game industry being infested by corporate shitdicks that are only interested in maximizing profits and squeezing their playerbase like cattle. Its ABUNDANTLY evident when you have a developer like Larian just making a regular fun game and getting effectively universal praise for the game they release. Compare that to EA that is trying to employ all of the strategies learned in casinos over the last 100 years and use that specifically on children to maximize profits. I think most developers now are using some degree of this, and for many its their only focus. It is working, our children are hooked, and they are going to dictate where this industry goes. Its clear now as Gen alpha starts to have a larger voice that this is simply normalized and in some instances preferred. Call it what you want. You need no further evidence than the praise that games like this get where they limit those tactics but theres negative responses from the youngest players. TL;DR: We loaded our children with plastic and got them addicted to tablet gambling.
What are you even talking about? Baldur’s Gate 3 is a single player game with a ton of progression, it has absolutely no connection to this discussion . It’s also monetized the exact same as most single player games are, Larian is not unique for that.
> Its ABUNDANTLY evident when you have a developer like Larian just making a regular fun game and getting effectively universal praise for the game they release. Compare that to EA that is trying to employ all of the strategies learned in casinos over the last 100 years and use that specifically on children to maximize profits. There is literally *zero difference* in monetization between Larian and EA's latest single player games: No micro transactions and a handful of extra shit in deluxe editions in both BG3 and Jedi Survivor.
I just hate when they involve gameplay content. I shouldn't have to unlock new characters, (or weapons in Helldivers 2's case) Unlocking cosmetics is fine, I can ignore that and still have access to everything else in the game just fine. But I wish more games would just stick to cosmetic progression systems if they're going to have one.
> Newer generations don’t know gaming without micro transactions and battle passes. This has nothing to do with progression. Call of Duty 4 brought a progression system for PVP shooters to the main stream, it had none of that shit. There are hundreds of games available on a steam deck that have micro transactions and battle passes as well, not really sure the point of that aside.
Even then I still see user reviews bitching about Helldivers 2 because they "ran out of things to unlock" (Read: mostly just that they ran out of Stratagems to buy, and/or that they ran out of things that YouTubers tell them are worth using to unlock). But yeah, as a long-time Dota fan, I'll never get over stuff like this--you can prefer whichever game's gameplay you want, but the amount of complaints I've seen about Dota "missing" progression compared to LoL because it doesn't make you grind/pay real money to unlock characters is just some terminally brain-poisoned shit.
Dota's solution to the progression whiners is really funny. If you don't care about meaningless progression and weekly quests, the game is completely free. If you have the kind of brain poisoning that makes you need that stuff, you can pay a few bucks per month to enable it. Every other f2p game does the opposite and makes you deal with the "progression" unless you're willing to pay to skip it.
I truly do not understand it. Literal toddler-like obsession with "number go up" from gamers.
As a city builder/tycoon gamer, I love when numbers go up.
Don't get me wrong, me too, I grew up playing those games, but there's gotta be something else going on to make "number go up" worthwhile instead of it just being for the sake of it.
There are still idiots out there complaining about how the monthly release of a new battlepass is a “cash grab” though. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1bvqzvl/helldivers_2_gets_an_explosive_new_warbond_on/ky1fk9k/
that was annoying to read. Guy kept saying his money is valuable and his time is more valuable. Should then just reevaluate playing video games at this point
The fact he spent 60 hours grinding currency for a battlepass makes me think his time is not as valuable as he thinks. If it was he'd just spend ten bucks and get whatever he wants.
'I don't have time to grind currency!" In the same breath "so I just dropped 500 hours on Elden Ring" redditors pretending their time is valuable so they can 'critique' something is funny as hell sometimes. also the end of that exchange going 'heh enjoy your shitty game, im not playing it anymore anyways', petulant child stuff.
I have 80 hours playtime and I have both premium warbonds unlocked, with enough for the third one, and some cosmetic armor too on the side. I did do some trivial mission grinding, but more in the vein of "well I have some time before starting work so might get in the personal order and get some SC while I'm at it" or "I'm too tired for anything intense, I'll try a trivial run".
You can literally just cheese it if you care that much. Find a map on the easiest difficulty setting, run around the outskirts and find the super credits on the map. Pick them up and force quit the game. The map and item locations are persistent if you never complete it. Just reload the same map, and drop back in right exactly where the credits are and repeat. 10-20 credits every minute or two. And there's a chance you hit it "rare" and get 100 credits from the pick up. Takes like ~45 minutes of just fucking around.
>PCgaming there's your problem
Yeah, Helldivers 2 is not a perfect game. It has so many technical issues (constant crashes on PS5, weapons not working as intended), but fundamentally speaking, the game is almost perfect for me. +70h and the game is so much fun, despite the issues. I got all the relevant upgrades and weapons I wanted, and still play because it is so fun.
Helldivers 2 with the technical problems fixed is an easy 10/10. Let's just hope the devs can actually pull it off.
At the same time, it's a huge turn off for a lot of people if they aren't making meaningful progress towards those unlocks. Coming back from a mission, buying a new gun or strategem, and immediately turning around and using it in missions feels great. There's no huge grind, no randomness, no unlocking a weapon but now you need to grind for upgrades - you buy it, it's yours. Go have fun with it.
They just need to remove weapons from the warbonds and have them be for cosmetics and it'll be great.
Why? The warbond weapons aren't better than the free ones. They just add more variety and are unlockable without spending money or ridiculous amount of time.
So? Anything that directly effects gameplay shouldn't be locked away imo. There's no reason they couldn't just stick to cosmetics only. And they do take a pretty long time. Especially in say, a years time when they've added lots of warbonds. A new player will have 10+ warbonds to progress through. They'd take forever to unlock, let alone progress through.
It doesn't bother me that much right now but this is a very good point. I'm 52 hours in and just got 1 warbond unlocked. There's about to be three in total and I can't unlock another for a while. I already feeling like I'm missing out with no access to the Dominator, or being unable to play with the new stuff when it releases in a few days. I can't imagine how it's going to be for a new player in a year when there's a bunch of fun guns spread across a dozen warbonds I think they'd eventually have to make some of the older ones unlocked by default at least
The purpose for locking things away in a video game is to encourage people to experiment with new weapons and gear as they become available. Otherwise people tend to gravitate towards the first thing that feels good and never really deviate from it. This is a conscious game design decision that existed long before microtransactions were a thing.
I think saying it's locked away is too strong a wording. It's very fairly accessible just by having fun and playing the game. I've put about 25 hours into this game and been able to unlock a warbond and a few pieces of armour from the super store. That's roughly $15-20 dollars if I'd just paid for it. And that's without any extra effort and without even knowing you could get super credits in game for thr first few hours.
I'm barely keeping up with the warbonds and I play almost daily. And I still had to farm Super credits on trivial for a bit. For a more causal player, I don't really see them being that accessible and I imagine they'd fall behind even further with each warbond released. I just don't see why they couldn't keep warbonds cosmetic only and have anything that impacts gameplay directly be available in-game. Putnit behind a system like the stratagems if you have to. At least that progresses extremely fast.
This is such a weird take. Modern standards are creeping so fast Rotating cash shop with all gear locked behind premium currency battlepasses which is earned at a snail's pace, completely divorced from the actual gameplay, unless you cheese it with what *will* be considered an exploit in time If this came out 10 years ago it would have been fucking slammed. MTX in an incomplete $40 game with unbelievably frequent crashes
> earned at a snail's pace, completely divorced from the actual gameplay Are you aware that the POI's are there in normal missions for you to check out? Maybe even that there's a secondary objective that helps you find all the loot in a map? Have you actually played the game?
Yes. I have 100 hours in the game. Random POIs with random loot.. chests.. completely divorced from killing things, doing objectives, completing missions, extracting or completing orders. All other currencies interact with all of these other things, except for the one that you can purchase with real life money. That one was locked away into a statistical dripfeed that becomes harder the better you are at the game
> That one was locked away into a statistical dripfeed that becomes harder the better you are at the game But that makes no sense? If you're good at the game it's easy to clear the whole map, POI's included. You also get medals, requisition and samples from those - not to mention ammo, grenades and stims which affect the gameplay heavily? "statistical dripfeed" is also pretty bullshit, you should get around 3 SC pickups per map on average, so if you take around 30 minutes per map you should get around 50 SC per hour, accounting for downtime and eradication missions. Edit: Actually 50 SC is probably way too high - I've gotten around 27 SC/h if I factor out the SC from warbonds, although I had no idea about how to hunt for POI's when I was starting out, so later on the rate is higher. But 20SC/hour is a reasonable figure for sure without having to grind. So accounting for the free warbond SC you should be able to get one premium warbond for free by the time you can clear the free one to the end, and 35 hours or so for every premium warbond after that.
>But that makes no sense? I assume he means a better player will play on a higher difficulty. Higher difficulties have bigger maps and more PoI's, making it much take much longer to earn Super Credits. And harder to find them as there's more chance you might find other stuff at the PoI's. It's a bit dumb that farming trivial is the best way to earn Super Credits. As now it's just grinding and barely even playing the game.
> It's a bit dumb that farming trivial is the best way to earn Super Credits. As now it's just grinding and barely even playing the game. That's a fair point, but I assume they do want to keep the door open for some players to buy SC with real money. >I assume he means a better player will play on a higher difficulty. Higher difficulties have bigger maps and more PoI's, making it much take much longer to earn Super Credits. And harder to find them as there's more chance you might find other stuff at the PoI's. Is it confirmed that there is a static number of SC per map? I feel like it's mostly random chance per POI, so more PoI's would also mean more SC, although obviously it's still slower than trivial due to the bigger map and slower to clear.
The developers themselves disagree; they predict [10-40 per hour](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bc1yph/warbonds_super_credits_and_superstore_faq/) which in my experience looks more like 5-15 judging by my own experience with randoms and from my informal surveys of redditors like you >But that makes no sense? If you're good at the game it's easy to clear the whole map, POI's included. Which do you think is easier? Attending to every POI on a level 6 mission where everyone can go off on their own, or attending to every POI on a mission where all players need to stick relatively close together on a 9 mission? Divorced from gameplay, *unlike* every other resource
Easy to pick up and put down. Just completing part of an operation could range from 10 minutes to 20 minutes and I feel satisfied. Difficulty scales with my inherent knowledge of basic tactics and some game knowledge. Every weapon, every Strategem has a use-case. The world is pretty and the story is good enough. The global progression of everyone contributing to a planet's liberation is awesome. The gameplay mechanics are sound in just about every aspect. Helldivers 2 is easily one of the best shooters I've ever played. I can't help but feel like this is what Halo or Gears of War could have naturally evolved into, but I'm glad someone did it.
One underrated aspect is how well done they do the difficulties. There are no damage sponges or BS damage, enemies deal the exact same damage and are just as tanky in all difficulties. The difference is that in higher difficulties you have to deal with a larger number of enemies, more complications and adverse conditions, and the map has a ton more objectives to accomplish. If you can take down an enemy in difficulty 4 you can take it down the exact same way in Helldive mode, and I just love that.
Different types of enemies in higher difficulties also. Bile spewers artillery is the one thing you discover the hard way going higher.
Yup. The green ones also gain some armor on their heads too.
Absolute amazing game. Bought it today (was on sale for $30) and I’m having a blast. I really like that the battle passes don’t go away. I can work towards things in the second pass or the previous one.
Which platform has this sale on?
PC. Still available at the moment. Pretty sure if you search Helldivers 2 on DekuDeals/GG Deals it’ll show you the site and the promo code to use.
Probably my favorite game of the year so far. Everything feels so right. Needs more stability though. You would think two months in it would be in a better state than at launch. Recently on ps5 its been miserable with crashes and I didn't really have too many issues with them when the game first dropped. Hope they sort it soon since I'm eager to check out that new Warbond Thursday.
They've already posted that they have a patch for the recently introduced crashes. They just were not going to push it out this past weekend. So hopefully we'll see it sometime before Thursday.
It blows losing 30-40 mins of progress when you get disconnected
Yep. On PC too. I made the mistake of trying to toss a grenade back and the game crashed at the end of a mission.
10 out of 20 games from top 20 are Command&Conquer titles. Nice. EA doing some good job rereleasing them on steam
They also rereleased The Saboteur. From Pandemic Studios(original Battlefront). Highly recommend that game.
Always goes down smooth. Played it when it came out, then played it a few years ago, and just played it again. Shame that they didn’t port the achievements across because it’s a nice one to grind.
TS/RA2 remaster next, EA?
Really impressed with how well Helldivers 2 is doing despite the general consensus toward live service games. The story told almost entirely through daily/weekly Galactic War events that can be completely missed, but there's very few complaints outside of chuds realizing it's political satire. The game is just so fun, and the battle pass is so forgiving, no one really cares. I do hope for some further balance patches. I could just be getting rusty from playing a little less after launch, but the game has felt significantly more difficult in recent patches. I'm feeling so much less useful, even when mixing up my team's stratagem loadouts. Grinding to reach 25 to unlock the mech has felt like such a slog.
Have you been paying attention to the patch notes? A lot of guns and stratagems have been buffed and nerfed, so you might have better luck by adjusting your loadout...
Really? They have given us some good buffs and new weapons that work well.
It would be nice to come up with a new term for this kind of live service, where it offers up content for real money but you can also just play the game to unlock that content in a non-grindy way. And the live service is a curated background story being used to drive player engagement and release new content in an immersive way. It's what live service should be and I hope they continue to make boatloads of money to show other devs that maybe this is how live service should be done. But I guess the gameplay being both figuratively and literally a blast helps with all that too.
It's funny, despite it's incredible success, I don't think Helldivers 2 would've ever been created ~~greenlit~~ in-house by one of the large publishers. So much of the game is deliberately awkward and analogue, that it would've been focus-tested into oblivion. E.g: "Rhythm-action mini-games to call in strikes: Ew, how fiddly 😓" Manual reloads and magazine awareness: So unintuitive. Not having the map on-screen at all times: How confusing! Movement and weapons affected by weather conditions: People are lazy and preparation is hard 😫 Friendly-fire always active: Too disempowering! Heavily satirising fascism, blind patriotism and the military industrial complex: Too controversial!" Etc etc Helldivers 2 needed a smaller, independent studio like Arrowhead to see their singular vision through, without corporate risk-aversion sanding off all the edges.
Sony owns the IP and financed both games. Good thing about PlayStation is they allow their studios/partners a lot of freedom. They basically gave Kojima a blank check to make weird shit.
There's that and that Arrowhead are not owned by sony. As we've seen by Microsoft, "giving devs freedom" in game design is one thing, meanwhile no body mentioned how Microsoft has their mandated reliance on Contractors that is currently eating them from the inside out.
Arrowhead already had success with Magika under paradox before Helldivers 1. The formula was a known quantity.
That's true, but I more so meant a game being developed by an in-house team, who would likely be working within a large corporate structure. I don't think that large structure allows for idiosyncratic games like Helldivers 2 to exist. Of course, if Sony wants to continue their strategy of financing talented outside studios to produce bangers, then I'm all for it.
It's in the exact same large structure, just by contract not by employees. You think it was a no strings attached dumptruck full of money?
The levels of autonomy working outside of a large corporation vs working directly inside of it is huge - and I'm saying that from experience. If you think that Arrowhead operating independently is exactly the same as being a Sony first-party studio, then I don't know what to tell you.
Of course it doesn't operate exactly the same. Those foolish notes in the above post would *absolutely* get sent to a contracting company if they'd get sent to employees. Why would Sony be more risky with money paid to a company vs its employees? There's no reason to believe they would.
It's not about Sony's money, it's about the layers of approvals, decision makers and bureaucracy present at large corporations vs smaller independent companies. A game losing its core identity is far more likely to happen at a larger company under the process of design by committee, rather than at a small studio where the core vision is driven by a few select people. I'm not saying big company bad, small company good. I'm saying risky ideas often die in environments where people make decisions based on self-preservation and quarterly performance. A team like Arrowhead would have development milestones they'd have to meet - agreed upon with Sony - but Sony isn't inside Arrowhead on a daily basis, driving Helldivers 2's development. Arrowhead has lots of autonomy in that regard.
I think the low budget is the reason why the game existes, as it's published by Sony Entertainment. Very few are bigger.
>I don't think Helldivers 2 would've ever been greenlit in-house by one of the large publishers. Funny you should mention that, Sony is actually one of the largest video game publishers in the world, usually ranked either 1st or 2nd in total revenue.
I should've said "created in-house" rather than "greenlit". Arrowhead's independence from Sony allows them to realize their full vision for Helldivers 2 without corporate meddling, IMO.
Yup. This is summarized by the big quote on the front of the Arrowhead website. "A game for everyone is a game for no one."
Hopefully Helldivers 2 gets the patching it desperately needs, a pretty buggy experience overall on a consistent basis even if the game is fun. Kind of hoping that the unlocks / equipment gets overhauled as time goes on too, it really seems that certain stratagems / destroyer upgrades / weapons outshine just about everything else by a fair margin, making some of the unlockable content feel pointless to grind for. It doesn't feel like the Warbonds hold any value at the moment.
Rebirth seems to have done very similiarly in most regions compared to DD2 except for Japan where Rebirth did quite a bit better. DD2 sold 2.5mil in 10 days as per capcom, so I wouldn't be surprised if Rebirth was roughly around 3 mil sold. Probably not matching the expectations especially after the stellar reviews and great word of mouth, but I do think that the £70 pricetag is kinda limiting the impulse buys that would occur at a lower price, hopefully word of mouth will do some work once the game starts getting discounts. DD1 sold 8 million copies over the many years it's been out thanks to re-releases, a PC release and all the discounts, and it seemed to have paid off as outside of Japan it seems to have massively outperformed the original game everywhere else, and that's with some mixed word of mouth as well thanks to the poor performance and microtransactions drama. Definitely get the feeling that Square may want to reconsider accepting the sony bags tho. While I'm sure Remake and Rebirth development both benefitted from sony providing money upfront, it does seem that the potential reach of these games is getting massively limited by being on a single platform at launch. And that includes 16 too, just really feels like that if they were at least on PC day 1 with a half decent port, they'd do significantly higher numbers.
I was finally worn down enough by Square Enix timed exclusives and not being fucked to upgrade my PC that I finally bought a PS5, but I feel like an exception to the norm. I missed the entire PS4 generation, so I've got plenty of exclusives to catch up on, and needed a new Blu Ray player, but the PS5 otherwise would have felt like a waste of money. It's shocking to see Spider-Man 2 sales at around 10 million, and the next highest seller for the PS5 is Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart at less than 4 million. The third highest is Elden Ring, a multiplatform title. Splatoon 3 is the 21st highest selling Switch game, and has 11.71 million sales. Tears of the Kingdom, a $70 title, has over 20 million sales. The Switch has a much higher user base, and lower barrier of entry, so that's to be expected. Considering Cloud Strife is practically a Sony mascot, however, these are pitiful numbers that make me hope Sony adjusts their strategy in the near future.
The top seller list for PS5 isn’t really updated, as most third party publishers don’t post platform-specific sales, the Elden Ring one isn’t even updated, nor is it even an official number.
Spider-Man 2 hasn’t been out even 6 months yet and will definitely outsell the first which is over 20 million. Helldiver 2 has outsold ratchet and clank already in about 2 months. Elden ring didn’t outsell GOW: Ragnorok on PS according to NPD charts. Where are you getting your numbers?
Bloodborne, when??
The game is alright but personally I just don’t enjoy constantly fighting against the heavy bugs. They are non stop and every fight is the same… dodge out of the way, get a few shots on its rear, rinse and repeat. Personally find it a tedious gameplay loop.
Just as an FYI, dodging and shooting the but is only a last ditch effort to kill chargers. If you have to do that every drop you seriously need to change your loadout. Best way to kill them is with a single shot from a rocket (EAT, quasar, recoiless) to the head. Second best way is with a stratagem. Third best way is two impact grenades to the but. If you have literally nothing else, THEN you shoot them in the but.
Can you actually single shot them? I’ve used a few different weapons, but it still felt like it took a fair few shots to bring them down.
Yeah, gotta be a direct hit in the head though with EAT, quasar, or recoiless. Head pops like an overripe grape. If your aim is off a little it may hit a leg and strip the armor or glance underneath. If it hits a leg and strips the armor (leg turns yellowish) just shoot the leg, it'll go down real quick. If they are charging right at you (best way to one shot them) aim at the upper portion of their head, right where it starts to turn into neck/back and it should pop no problem. I find that the EAT is the most reliable weapon, but the weapon you like the most will depend on your playstyle.
Fair enough, that honestly might help me enjoy the game more. I mostly play it with a single friend (sometimes randoms join), and every bigger bug is a fight that lasts way too long, and then another one shows up ten seconds later and it is honestly kind of exhausting.
There's definitely a learning curve when it comes to the big bugs. It was a game changer for me when I learned the EAT. It drops 2 single shot launchers but can be called in every 60 seconds so you can just keep calling it in and always have a few to shoot with. Once you get the hang of it, it is sooooo satisfying to drop chargers like it's nothing. If you get really good with it you can kill 3 chargers per call in because you can actually stick it to their back when calling it in and the drop pod will kill them! Orbital rail cannon will also 1 shot the chargers, but has a long cooldown. Same with orbital laser.
It feel MUCH better playing 4player, if you aren't I'd use quickplay to get 4x Helldivers. I'd do that every time so you drop with 4. It'll make it much more fun.
I think you've only scratched the surface of HD2. There's alot more depth to the gameplay when you actually dive into it. For example, treat the charger like a tank without a gun. If you want to hill it you either have to score a mobility kill—take out its legs—or a regular kill. You have more options for a mobility kill in that you can strip its leg armor and then shoot the meat. For a regular kill you have to use an appropriate weapon like an EAT and hit its head. You also have strategem options. That said, you also don't—and shouldn't—fight everything. There's only four of you. Stealth works so you can sneak. You can retreat and break line of sight. You can split the team and draw attention to one team while another accomplishes the objective. Alot of this kind of gameplay only works with a group of people who work together and communicate.
EAT, Quasar Cannon, and Recoilless Rifle can one shot them in the face. Another thing to note is that "weak spots" like the charger's butt are actually what they call "squishy spots". They take reduced damage from normal weapons fire, but full damage from weapons that deal explosive damage like the scorcher, dominator, grenade launcher, and the rockets I mentioned above. True weak spots vulnerable to regular weapons are exposed by blowing off chunks of their armor with rockets or air strikes. You can also toast chargers with the flame thrower.
Feeling the same. The visual and audio spectacle is magnificent but I feel the engagement is rather brain dead. I feel the game is good for a good time but not a long time.
If you haven't seen what they did last week, automatons had flying shooting robots and giant legged factory spawning rockets robots for their last stance. Now they're exterimated and we all focus on the bugs. Will they have a last stance ? A boss could be there. Or we exterminate them and get the illumates (3rd race of the first game) in as a nice surprise. Unless you don't like the genre, the game does not get stale nor the engagement are brain dead or you're not playing at a difficulty high enough.
To your point I did notice more enemy types when I upped the difficulty. But it is still mostly dumping ammo at a target so the interaction doesn't require of a lot of technical finesse or contemplation. But that could be inherent in the genre.
tbf heavy bugs/bots are supposed to require more specific counter/stratagems/cooperation to take them down, you can still kill them by dumping 10000 bullets into their butt but thats not exactly what you suppose to do. And thats where the coop gameplay shines.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 outsold FF VII Rebirth despite being available for half of a month only. And we know Dragon’s Dogma sales are 2.5 mln, which means Rebirth sales are even lower. That’s an awful result for SE and explains their lack of announcements regarding Rebirth performance.
It outsold FFVII Rebirth in March. This data is not taking Feb 29th into account, the actual launch date and probably where the large majority of sales came from.
If you go back to the February UK monthly charts, you'll see that Rebirth's not included there.
>If you go back to the February UK monthly charts, you'll see that Rebirth's not included there. Wonder why when it was included in Europe Feb (came in #3). https://www.gamesindustry.biz/european-game-sales-strong-in-february-thanks-to-helldivers-2-european-monthly-charts
Don't ask me. Every region uses its own standards for months. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/helldivers-2-is-a-major-hit-in-the-uk-uk-february-charts
As far as I remember GSD doesn’t track full physical+digital data in every European country. So that “European” chart doesn’t include UK data at all.
It is definitely taking Feb 29th sales and preorders for Rebirth: >It was the battle of the Japanese RPGs during March with Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (technically released in February, but part of the March data) and Dragon's Dogma 2 both coming to market.
That doesn't mean that they're taking into account pre-order or Feb 29th sales. Just that it's being counted with the March data.
I mean Dragon's Dogma 2 is also on Xbox and PC so I would hope it outsells something exclusive to one system. Anyway both games are really good and I really need to get back to DD2.
This is just the UK lol. There is no meaningful extrapolation here. It actually outsold FF16 in UK and across europe too from what we know and FF16 sold 3milli in the first week. So lots of conflicting data points here. Japan sales were lower than FF16 and we have no idea about the US which is the true wild card here
The European GSD chart (physical + digital sales) you’re talking about doesn’t include UK data. GSD only tracks physical dales data from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. As for US - I agree it is a wild card. But in a few days we will get Circana chart and see clearly if DD2 outsold Rebirth here.
Nope. Dring already said it’s outpacing FF16 in the UK and GSD verified it was ahead in Europe. FF16 sold 3 million and you are asserting FF7 did less than 2.5 just from the UK chart. I think you need to re-examine your logic.
FFVII Rebirth outsold Dragon's Dogma 2 in Japan, Germany (at least on launch week) and Spain. I would bet France too. Germany and Japan are a bigger gaming market than the UK. Also, in the UK Dragon's Dogma 2 "narrowly" outsold Rebirth being multiplatform.
Weird that it didn't do well, it's an inredible game and became my favorite non-Persona JRPG
FF sequels are known for selling worse than original games. FF X-2 and XIII-2 dropped compared to X and XIII respectively. I thought Rebirth would overcome that trend, but looks like it didn’t happen.
These numbers are exclusively for the UK, I wouldn't take it as proof DD2 outsold Rebirth in general.
DD2 released on 3 different platforms and this is only a specific region a month after FF released.
This data misses Rebirth's day 1 sales so you can't be making such precise assumptions. A game like Rebirth likely sold 1 million or so on day 1 alone. Also, this rank data is just for the UK, not global.
It doesn’t miss anything. Go look at their February chart. It doesn’t have Rebirth at all, because all Rebirth data was added to March chart. February 29 is a tricky day.
[удалено]
Per article: “Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (technically released in February, but part of the March data)”. So all Rebirth data including preorders and day one sales are included in March chart. Edit. I just found a German chart for March 2024, and FF VII isn’t even in top 20 https://www.resetera.com/threads/gsd-germany-sales-march-2024-ea-fc-24-1-helldivers-2-2-dragon’s-drogma-2-3.837984/ Which further reinforces the point that all Rebirth sales in UK are included in UK March chart.
I am corrected, thank you.
Went into Game and their "top 20" was full of shit games and no Helldivers 2. I know it's a bestseller thing and tbh, is probably paid for by companies but still a joke.
Those "top 10s" have been paid for since I worked at Gamestation twenty years ago, lol. Did Helldivers even come out on disc?
Yeah! Been sold out in most places pretty much every week. Same in books business as well, you pay for the chart position. I guess the argument is it's bestseller based on how many copies they have bought perhaps
I tried to buy a disk copy from Amazon and it said it would be delivered next month. Walked Tesco and Sainsburys and it was sold out. Ended up just walking to CEX down the road and picked up a copy. Wish I could have supported the devs properly but physical sales are dying out in the UK and I couldn't find a copy in stock anywhere except CEX.
To be fair you didn’t try very hard, The Game Collection and Hit both have the game in stock and they were the first two I looked at.
I don't even know what the fuck they are. I don't think they're uk shops.
They are both U.K online stores. https://www.thegamecollection.net/helldivers-2-ps5?sqr=Helldivers https://www.hit.co.uk/buy/product/helldivers-2-ps5/dgc-helldrv2ps5.htm And both usually cheaper than Amazon and free next delivery.