[STEAM] Helldivers 2 hits mostly negative on Steam as player frustrations grow: ‘You had lightning in a bottle and decided to pry the lid off yourself’

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Helldivers 2 is one of the most popular games in recent memory, with a gameplay loop so addictive that you could easily lose yourself in its world and chaotic action. It has a lot of players and has maintained a strong audience for over two years now. However, there have been problems in the game since launch, as well as highly requested features that never made it into the game, which, combined with Arrowhead's horrible patches and sporadic PR mishaps, have caused a lot of frustration among the players.

And that frustration has, for the umpteenth time, boiled over into a review bombing campaign that sent the game's recent Steam reviews into 'mostly negative' territory. While there wasn't any specific patch or update that caused this rapid decline on Valve's storefront, the April 28 Warbond, Exo Experts, released with paywalled mechs and was a thorn in players' eyes since yet another premium battle pass was added into the game while so many other issues remain unresolved.

Prior to that, former Arrowhead chief and present CCO of the company, Johann Pilestedt, hosted an AMA where he generally responded with negative remarks about highly requested features, such as ship modules, a proper endgame, weapon customization, transmog, perks, and so on. For most of these mentioned features, Pilestedt said that they were either not being planned or discussed or that they're not even remotely ready for public disclosure. This, of course, while many of his other answers were positive and all of them were well-intentioned, caused a massive uproar within the Helldivers 2 community, some of whom bee-lined it for the Steam reviews with no positivity in mind.

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The Warbond mentioned above came after the AMA, essentially fanning the flames that were already burning with rage.

Today, players on the game's subreddit discussed its fall from grace (again), with one noting how the AMA probably caused most of the outrage, even though balance patches that some users say prioritized paying players did produce at least some of the negative responses.

"Pilestedt's well-intentioned AMA was probably the worst thing Arrowhead could have possibly done. It was PR suicide to so casually say that things almost the entire community has been asking for for the last two years either aren't being considered at all, have been abandoned outright, aren't a priority, or to suggest they are pointless because only 'hardcore' players care about them,"

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The patches in question are the durable damage update that significantly increased enemy damage to mechs and armor, as well as the Hive Guard patch that only came out yesterday. In fact, yesterday's patch, despite all the fallout from the AMA onwards, only contained updates to the High Guard enemy that was buffed and made quite a bit tankier even though many combat-related mechanics like mantling and climbing as well as some weapons that you can use remain buggy.

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Arrowhead "had lightning in a bottle and decided to pry the lid off yourself," adding that the studio "consistently snatch[es] defeat from the jaws of victory, and at this point it doesn’t feel accidental anymore."

"Weapons swing between feeling incredible and being completely unusable, with no consistency or clear design direction. Enemies get buffed while player tools get nerfed, and every update feels like it undoes the last instead of building on it," they wrote. Additionally, the player outlined how Helldivers 2 lost its narrative side as well over the last two years, with players left feeling "irrelevant" when major campaigns roll around since they now feel "scripted" rather than active and alive. I myself loved rallying behind certain goals that the game threw at us, engaging with other players and roleplaying as a Super Earth citizen out on the frontlines defending the values of Managed Democracy.

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And I genuinely see that absence of meaningful stories and campaigns, as for a while now it appeared to me that Arrowhead fixed the results of these events that are, as the review above says, short-lived and only last for a few days now.

At the end of the day, though, Helldivers 2 is a live-service game with a massive community. At some point, a large enough number of fans are going to feel left behind and either lose interest or become irritated by how the studio is running the live-service model. It's happened to so many games in the past, and it is unsurprising that it's happened here, and not for the first time either. The more passionate a community is, the likelier this outcome is. And Arrowhead, so long as it keeps working on the game, can always address these issues and requests, and fairly quickly, too.

But whether that'll actually happen remains to be seen, and even though it's a dramatic and radical measure, I think reviews are a great way for fans to feel seen.

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