In my personal opinion, Arrowhead maintains a very high standard when it comes to communication and updates. However, the gameplay itself wasn’t particularly appealing to me, and as a result, I didn’t stick with HD2 for long.
On the other hand, Fatshark’s games are, as a whole, extremely well-crafted—on par with AAA titles, and in terms of combat, I would even say they surpass them. The gameplay is deeply engaging and, for me, truly irreplaceable. That said, while their communication and update policies aren’t the absolute worst, they certainly aren’t very good either.
It’s well known that Fatshark doesn’t release roadmaps, but even so, I believe the community managers shouldn’t just serve as mere “puppets” of the company. Instead, they should strive to foster communication that genuinely connects with the players.
Ugh. Huge can of worms there. Long story short, yes, they did BUT, in the same paragraph, they then explained that by that they just meant a game that is continuously updated and maintained after launch vice how it used to be in the old days when a game launched and that was it. They also said VT2 was similarly “live service”.
In effect, what they were saying was that the game would be similar in updates and upkeep to VT2. Which is much closer to the truth than being the more-widely-accepted definition of “live service”. They created a lot of confusion by using a common industry term in a non-standard way.
To be honest, my MAIN issue with Helldivers is the Medals system. I also strongly prefer Darktide’s Combat and Design, even if the state of its Balancing is a mess right now.
But yeah, I shouldn’t need to grind for Medals after already grinding for or buying SC to unlock a Warbond. To those who disagree with me on this, I’m giving you the Major Order to get a JOB.
So, instead of saying something like “that is just blatenly false”, what depth is lacking in your eyes?
There are so many little things you can know, a ton of interactions to learn, a ton of builds to try. Most weapons have their own niche and prefered targets. Each enemy has a ton of hitzones which change interactions and their own behaviour to learn / play around.
But yeah, I could also say that “you just shoot the enemy until they die” and now it sounds like there is no depth.
HD2 has it’s own skillset. There isn’t much more to be said about it. Apples and oranges and all that.
The only problem medals have is the relatively low cap of 250 when each warbond can cost up to 700+ medals. and not even everyone agrees that there is a problem with not being able to hoard enough medals to finish each warbond the moment it comes out.
It really doesn’t take long to get a ton of medals, if you play on high difficulties regularly. I can get each release a day or 2 after they come out AND I have a job.
Grinding for SC is boring AF rn but the fact that it’s even possible is massive. Something FS tried to dabble with and promptly abandoned.
It’s the principle of it. I ABSOLUTELY CAN DO THAT, but I shouldn’t HAVE to keep grinding for things after I already spent ages grinding for SC to unlock the damn Warbond. It’s just a stupid Player Retention measure with no other value. Grind² isn’t something that should exist ESPECIALLY if literal content is locked behind it.
If someone spends 15 AUD on a Warbond, or grinds for 1000 SC, they’ve earned that Warbond and ALL of the content in it. 110 Medals for a Warp Backpack that’s at the very end of its Warbond? What a joke.
But no, I should just be okay with being forced to use old content that I’ve exhausted my fun with to death in order to unlock something that I wanted but am now too burnt out to actually enjoy. Just give the people what they grinded or paid for, this is just arbitrary nonsense.
Considering the immense amount of content that they’re locking behind paywalls, not really. If Fatshark were a little bit more open to communication, able to capitalise on no-brainers more often and maybe just a liiittle bit faster… I’d have very little reason to play Helldivers over Darktide. Screw all this noise, I’m going back to The Witcher 3 before I burst a blood vessel.
Well put. I got some enjoyment out of playing HD2 with friends, but it is truly an endless treadmill for people who love endless treadmills. And with medals, you can’t even buy your way out of the grind.
Not reading the whole thread, but just chippin’ in to say nah.
Helldivers takes the L on this one for me for the sole reason that I can still play Darktide. I have not been able to play HD2 for more than an hour or two without it crashing or (here’s a new one) freezing my entire desktop until I hard reset. It’s actually insane. It’s not my pc either, because it is a fresh build and everything else runs completely fine on it.
Also there was a yet another new issue HD2 started giving me where it would entirely disable my microphone on launch until I unplugged and replugged.
It’s falling apart at the seams with every update even more than Darktide.
Live-service games at their finest. Not everyone likes it and that’s totally fine.
But it’s not exactly just a paywall, is it? You can earn it for free, it’s just boring to earn it for free, quickly. Now, I’m not saying that it isn’t ALSO a paywall. They want to earn money and that is how they chose to get it. You can either spend your money or your time but it’s never completely free.
Then there is also the aspect that there are plenty of other games out there where you straight up CAN’T earn premium currency through gameplay.
It’s a live-service game, you’re expected to get f*cked with on one way or another. At least it’s not got any FOMO tactics or predatory practices. That sh!t I’ve seen enough of for 1 trillion lifetimes. I’ll take another 1000 warbonds before I’d play release DT (or similar) ever again.
HD2’s medal grind is pretty bad, but in comparison to the state of games in general it’s a breath of fresh air.
Things have gotten really bad over the past decade and seeing a company not do that is at least worthy of acknowledgement.
So yeah, deliberately grinding for medals sucks.
So did grinding for currency in DT before the item reworks made it actually possible to get a good weapon quickly. So does grinding for pretty much anything else.
Yes, it’s a winning, “player friendly” perceived formula. But, I think I would prefer the HD1 model over it, even as pay to win as the snow boots (and arguably rumbler) were.
My biggest gripe (with the monetization) is AH was very adamant pre-release about advertising warbonds would fluctuate in price to adjust with quality/quantity/value and stated that no stratagems would be in warbonds. Then they, very unceremoniously and quietly, never abided by either of those advertised tenets, ostensibly under the protection of the ever-nebulous “at this time/subject to change” disclaimers on at least one or both of those statements.
To be fair, the pricing of things didn’t forsee colaborations iirc and the “no stratagems in warbonds” statement was a dumb restriction they (must’ve) decided to ignore, since it’s limiting them on what content they can put into the warbonds.
This would be like FS starting to sell DT map packs to make an extra buck after saying they wouldn’t be doing that. I wouldn’t find that acceptable, and I don’t know how this is OK for AH to do.
Sorry, I won’t be fair here. This is external to/regardless of the separate debacle the first collab “warbond” was.
There have been a couple/few warbonds now that had objectively less to offer from a quantity and quality standpoint, but they were all priced at 1000SC, even Masters of Ceremony, a meme warbond by most peoples’ standards.
Re: stratagems, much like FS’s stance with common game content, they advertised this warbond restriction (that they made themselves) as preventing paywall gating of core content unique to Helldivers as a franchise.
These have largely not even been noticed (or even known about by new players) thanks to the relatively outstanding player friendly model of their battlepass system. And, to my knowledge, it has seemed to be the one and only time they understand just ignoring comms on it is the best policy. But a bait and switch is a bait and switch and I won’t happily enjoy it.
I have no sympathy for AH’s countless, ceaseless own goals.
I find the gameplay of Darktide and HD2 to be different enough to make comparisons mostly subjective. They are both incredible 4-player co-op games in their own right, but HD2 (despite it’s many flaws) is a masterclass in creating a compelling live service experience.
I don’t think Darktide needs to do everything Helldivers does, but here’s my wish list:
Bug/WIP acknowledgements in patch notes (always thought this was a lovely touch of transparency and optimism)
Comms more frequent than once in a blue moon (dev blogs are a nice retrospective but I want to know what’s cooking)
Earn premium currency in-game
Spend premium currency in a reasonable fashion (warbonds are geared towards content drip-feed, wouldn’t want that in DT but it’s better than the artificial scarcity of rotating skins)
Flexible controller key-binding (keyboard too but I gotta say HD2 has amazing controller binds)
Strike team appears in the same hub instance
Solo mode (no bots in HD, fine, honestly I’d rather not have DT bots most times)
View matches in progress (it’s no lobby browser but you can see lonely helldivers!)
The medals in HD2 are a little annoying, but I find that, playing a couple hours a week, I get enough to keep up with releases. It’s annoying not getting to play with all the new stuff immediately once unlocking the warbond, but usually within 2-3 play sessions I’ll have it done, long before the next warbond is out, not much different than levelling weapon mastery in Darktide with a new weapon.
My biggest issue with HD2s economy honestly was Samples. The distribution of samples is weird, I was never lacking for Super Samples, not once did I ever have to grind for those, but Common samples were always in short supply. Arrowhead could have dumped Rare and Super samples entirely and I don’t think it would have changed my progression at all.
