Helldivers 2 Review and |OT| "Fight for freedom, fight for Democracy"
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
- Start date
I don't think what's limiting them is actual servers, i think some of their data handling isn't written to scale well across multiple servers which is why it's having so many problems. It probably requires a rewrite of how their database is set up, which will take time and testing. It's possible by the time the issue is truly resolved the peak of the game will be long gone and they won't need it any more...but every sony studio with live service ambitions need to consult with arrowhead on a post mortem to avoid similar problems
The CEO did say they would increase it soon yesterday. So possible it could have happened already.
OP
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Those tanks tht come are fucking rage inducing on suicide difficulty. I was getting hit with constant explosives and didn't know WTF it was until I saw the tanks!!!! I thought something was glitching.
This game keeps giving!
Oh yeah tanks are a menace. 1 salvo from 110mm rocket eagle can take it out if you hit it right though.
You guys need to read this thread about Helldivers on Era. The poster is some kind of analyst and he goes real deep.
www.resetera.com
https://www.resetera.com/
I was able to copy/paste it here
Unpacking the Magic in the Design of Helldivers 2
I wanted to make a thread about this game as it's one of the most enjoyable co-op games I've played in a long time. Truthfully, moment to moment Helldivers 2 might be the most enjoyable co-op game I've ever played, and I think a lot of people are feeling that, or something similar to it. I feel...
www.resetera.com
I was able to copy/paste it here
I wanted to make a thread about this game as it's one of the most enjoyable co-op games I've played in a long time. Truthfully, moment to moment Helldivers 2 might be the most enjoyable co-op game I've ever played, and I think a lot of people are feeling that, or something similar to it. I feel that I'm constantly seeing people say that it's the best co-op game they've played since Left for Dead. While I don't have a lot of experience with the first Left for Dead game, I want to unpack some of that and explore a little bit why I think Helldivers 2 is having such a profound impact on people and their desire to play games like this.
To that end, I'm going to examine the game through various lenses, with particular focus on psychological theory and a little on product positioning and marketing. Note that while drawing on these theories this isn't a concrete explanation for anything, this is just my attempt to unpack the fun in Helldivers 2, and other players might see things differently.
Before I continue I just want to note that I know that the game is suffering from technical issues and that it isn't all roses in that sense. I know these are real issues and those complaints are valid. Despite this, I want to keep this to a discussion about the games design. If you want to complain about the technical performance or connectivity issues, please use the OT instead.
Uncertainty and Predictive Processing
This is a major element that I wanted to discuss in Helldivers 2, so this is something that I wanted to lead with. It's long been hypothesized that uncertainty is a critical component in why we play games, and I think if we look at the landscape of games that are successful today, this is something that many of the most successful games capitalise on. Genres that have emerged to prominence like roguelikes and battle royales present uncertainty by reschaping the gameplay context each time the player chooses to play.
A predictive processing account for engagement and enjoyment with games suggests that players inherently seek to minimise prediction error, and that systems that provide opportunities for error are compelling by virtue of offering opportunity for players to generate more effective, future predictions. This process of updating your mental model, enabling you to be more accurate in future predictions, could be seen to underpin the 'one more go' effect in roguelike games. This also aligns with the supposed evolutionary benefits of play, where play is often considered a learning opportunity that leads to a survival benefit - after all, even bumble bees play.
This isn't to say that people necessarily enjoy absolute uncertainty, but that a certain degree of controlled uncertainty, which often leads to pleasant surprise, is desirable.
But how does this tie to Helldivers 2? I would argue that Helldivers 2 is one of the only games of its kind that harnesses uncertainty in every facet of its gameplay. The people at Arrowhead really understand the value of uncertainty in a manner that very few other games do. In fact almost everything in the game has some degree of controlled uncertainty to it, and all of its systems feed into that to allow players to create reliable, but always uncertain models of the games outcomes.
All of the small choices, feed into this idea.
Some of these elements are present in other games. If you look at a game like Deep Rock Galactic you can see many similar elements (likely in part because DRG is inspired by Helldivers 1), and you can see similar facets in mechanics like Left for Dead's AI director which makes the game a little different each time you play.
- Grenades bounce off enemies in ways that lead to unexpected trajectories
- Gunfire has heavy on recoil, making it difficult to always control perfectly
- Turrets make their own decisions on targets to shoot at, and risk harming players through friendly fire
- The friendly fire system means that other players can inadvertantly, kill their team mates, and you can never anticipate the behaviour of your allies (especially in quick play)
- Limb damage affects how your character performs (albeit briefly as this is cured with a stim)
- The enemies spawns are never the same, both in terms of speed, direction or types of enemies that are spawning
- Strategems can attach to enemies, either deliberately or accidentally leading to unintended effects
- The levels and their objectives are procedural stitched together, meaning you'll rarely see the same environments and each present different challenges
- When you're hit by an enemy or explosion you ragdoll to wildly varying effect. Sometimes you'll be blasted across the map and survive, another time you'll have an airstrike thrown out of your hand, next to your unfortunate team mate.
- Planets have different modifiers, which contribute to making the game different as you move through each environment
- Drop selection is low resolution, so it's difficult to know exactly what you'll see, or what threat you'll be in when you land
- The global war is hard to predict, one day we're fighting bugs on the eastern front, and then defending planets from automatons in the west
Most often, games present uncertainty in a manner that's very controlled. Borderlands and Diablo feature a fair amount of uncertainty but it mostly comes from the loot that players find, the effect of the players ability is always very consistent. Nonetheless, it's still a compelling mechanic in these games, but my argument is that Helldivers presents uncertainty in a manner that is quite interesting.
In Helldivers, uncertainty coming from almost every source can be described as more systemic, it's rooted in every feature and all of those features are interacting together. When players first start they might feel a little overwhelmed, but as the play more and more, you'll find a game that you can model the outcome of, but never with certainty.
Personally I think this is where other co-operative games fail. I'm an enjoyer of Destiny 1 and 2, but if I'm being honest its specific moments that carry me forward in that game. Moment to moment, the game is repetitive. The outcomes of a particular strike or activity are almost always certain, and by asking players to repeat the same activities over and over, players minimise any sense of uncertainty. They become bored. There's been some indication that Bungie understand this, activities that might present one of three different bosses at the end offer some degree of variability, but it's never sufficient because the method of introducing uncertainty requires vast content creation. Like with Diablo or Borderlands, the uncertainty doesn't present itself in the player and their ability which puts all of the burden on the designers to create new encounters and challenges that are different and those features need to be manually built by designers.
This isn't to say that all of this is entirely unique. Games like Breath of the Wild and Grand Theft Auto V really harness systemic design and uncertainty to create special experiences, but the games that have this appreciation are few and far between and even those examples in BoTW and GTA approach things very differently.
Flow and Optimal Challenge
Another major theory that Helldivers 2 harnesses to build a compelling experience is one of optimal challenge. Flow supposes that players need to experience a degree of challenge that is right for their capability, to feel engaged to play. If it is too hard then the game can feel feel hopeless and stressful, too little and it can become dull and fatiguing.
Not all compelling games can be explained through this lens of optimal challenge, games like cookie clicker have proven to be compelling but offer very little challenge. Nonetheless, Helldivers 2 is a game that appears to understand this psychological theory and apply it to its design, quite explicitly. With 9 incrementing difficulties and the ability to persistently progress by playing on any one of them players can find a difficulty that sits just right for them and still participate as part of the community. Even if you never clear a Helldive you can still contribute to the global war, complete the battlepass, and progress your character on any of these 9 difficulties.
Comparing to other co-operative games this is also something that they don't tend to do very well. What game allows you to participate in the end-game without playing on a challenging difficulty? Destiny's raids and dungeons come around, but they're always presented as particularly hard content and they always leave a certain subset of the community behind. That might be fine for Destiny, the game is successful and appeals to millions of players, but I think it's a heritable approach that Helldivers chooses not to do this.
Self-Determination Theory
One of the most conventionally popular psychological theories of motivation is self-determination theory which supposes that humans are motivated to engage with an activity through three basic needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness). Simplifying things, autonomy supposes that we want to be able to exert some degree of control, competence supposes that we want to feel as though we're developing skill and becoming good at the activity, and relatedness supposes that we need to have positive connections with other people. I think it's fairly obvious how Helldivers 2 ticks the boxes in terms of competence, most co-operative games do this very well so I won't go over this, but I want to talk a little about autonomy and relatedness.
Autonomy is a big factor in most games, we want to feel as though we're in control and I think Helldivers 2 provides a very strong sense of this, much more so than the majority of co-operative games. Helldivers has you choose everything at the start of the mission, your abilities (strategems), your weapons, primary, secondary and grenade, and the collection of these, and how you choose to use them really defines your playstyle from the outset. Not only this but the player has a lot of control of what challenge they undertake, the race they fight, the difficulty, the planet and as a result the conditions they fight in, and the location they drop into. All of these provide players with a sense of autonomy in how they participate in Helldivers 2. Each of these elements has a factor of uncertainty, but the uncertainty on each individual action is mild which helps preserve this sense of autonomy.
Second, and I think more uniquely is the sense of relatedness that you have in Helldivers 2. Helldivers has players participate in a global war, which means that every player has a pro-social incentive to collaborate. Of course this doesn't prevent player hostility, but the games systems actively encourage players to work together towards a common goal, and form positive relationships with one another along the way. Again I think that this is an aspect of the game that is very novel and most often, missing from other titles. Most games like Destiny get players to co-operate through forced dependency, you need other players to complete raids with you in Destiny 2, and therefore you invite other people to help you, that or there's no dependency and the game just is a co-op game by virtue of matchmaking you with other players.
Helldivers is different, sure there's that element of dependency, it can be easier or faster to complete missions with others, but even if you choose to play alone you're all contributing towards the same objectives which provides a sense of connection even if you choose to go it alone. At least in my experience this means that sense of relatedness is interwoven throughout the entire game, that sense that you're part of a wider community (that you also have an affect on) just by virtue of participating.
Player Friendly GaaS
The final element that I want to touch upon is more of a product position one, that it is anything to do with psychological theory. I think that people are fatigued by what they see as games as a service. It seems that in the eyes of many players, game as a service is synonymous with manipulation through mechanisms such as variable reward reinforcement tied to a fee (lootboxes) or the fear of missing out (battlepasses). In the psychologicla sense, Helldivers 2 has neither of these elements.
Helldivers 2 instead has something that resembles a battle pass, but operates differently to one. Specifically Helldivers has an entirely free pass that you can progress through by playing, and a premium pass that can unlock either by playing and gaining currency, or by paying. Neither pass expires, so players can always purchase and engage with previous passes. This provides an avenue for the developers to add content to the game, and a compelling reason for people to spend money if they want to unlock new items a little faster, but never threatens to leave anyone out.
In addition to this, the other live service facet is the dynamic war and future addition of content such as new enemy races and planets. Without the player ever spending anything the game and the experience it offers is always evolving forward, for everyone. Yes it does ask for your time or your money but the games design is compelling enough, and the games content generous enough that players will want to. Helldivers 2 feels like brilliant game first, that's supported by some interesting live operations.
I also wanted to take a moment to refute the idea that this is a pay to win game. I've seen this in a couple of youtube videos, claiming that because you can unlock things via the premium pass, the game is pay to win. I would highlight that everyone can unlock the premium pass through play (in about 20 hours) and that this is a co-operative game with no adversarial elements. So if someone unlocks something earlier than you, it really does not spoil or even significantly affect your experience at all. I think Helldivers 2 is very generous with its live service plans and the idea that it's pay to win is just a little silly.
Future Challenges
I wanted to write a little bit on the games future challenges because obviously it intends to have long-term appeal. I think despite the uncertainty at the core of a game, there is a risk that if Arrowhead don't do enough to mix things up, the game will still loose this factor over time. For me, Helldivers feels like it has the uncertainty of a multiplayer game, without being one, multiplayer games always have a major element of uncertainty by virtue of featuring actions defined by other players. But even those multiplayer games get stale over time as people learn the 'meta' and start to control all of their dynamic factors to replicate successful outcomes more often. I can already feel that in Helldivers 2 wherein the balance of weapons and strategems isn't quite there, many feel as though they aren't worth using and some strategies are so powerful that they disregard elements of the game designed to make the experience uncertain (such as the shield gen backpack, in my opinion). So Arrowhead will need to consciously address this over time, or the game will loose a degree of its appeal as players learn the ins and outs, and the definitively 'best' strategies.
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That's all I wanted to say. I wanted to write this up, personally because I haven't put together a long-writeup on a game in a long time and I think it's such a special and remarkable game. Not only do I think it's really cleverly designed with a lot of potential learnings for designers, I think that it's likely to be a seminal game too, a game that has the potential to mark a shift in how developers are approaching both the moment to moment, and wider design of their games including their live service elements.
Please feel free to use the thread to discuss these ideas and/or post your own thoughts on the design of Helldivers 2.
Here are some links to some of the ideas discussed in the thread
Predictive processing
Self-Determination Theory
Flow
Yes most of the time. Add me (same nickname) and message me like "Yobo" to know who you are.
Someone brought up a great point in that thread. There are no floating damage numbers when you shoot. You have a visual indicator if the shot glanced off, and you have visual damage indicators (puffs of bile/blood, sparks, smoke, damaged armor bits) that help you gauge the results of your shooting, and you only get a split second to determine whether your current course of action is correct or if you should change strategies. I think what the post doesn't mention is that it's not enough for a game to have uncertainty - that uncertainty needs to have a payoff, and I feel that what this game does in spades is REWARD you when you navigate that uncertainty by making correct decisions. You see a lane through a mass of bugs and begin sprinting through, prepping a grenade. You make a diving leap over the bug hole to your right as masses of bugs swarm behind and to the sides, and as you sail over you throw your grenade with enough accuracy to dump it in the hole, and it goes off throwing your body well clear of the masses of chasing bugs as well as clearing the medium bug nest you were just assaulting. Then the game gives you all sorts of positive feedback making you FEEL like you just accomplished something amazing through all the uncertainty and chaos.You guys need to read this thread about Helldivers on Era. The poster is some kind of analyst and he goes real deep.
https://www.resetera.com/Unpacking the Magic in the Design of Helldivers 2
I wanted to make a thread about this game as it's one of the most enjoyable co-op games I've played in a long time. Truthfully, moment to moment Helldivers 2 might be the most enjoyable co-op game I've ever played, and I think a lot of people are feeling that, or something similar to it. I feel...
I was able to copy/paste it here
OP
OP
LOL tht was deep.You guys need to read this thread about Helldivers on Era. The poster is some kind of analyst and he goes real deep.
https://www.resetera.com/Unpacking the Magic in the Design of Helldivers 2
I wanted to make a thread about this game as it's one of the most enjoyable co-op games I've played in a long time. Truthfully, moment to moment Helldivers 2 might be the most enjoyable co-op game I've ever played, and I think a lot of people are feeling that, or something similar to it. I feel...
I was able to copy/paste it here
83MC so far with 39 reviews, as I predicted:
https://www.metacritic.com/game/helldivers-2/
Normally I'd say that they need more time, that more reviews should come because they didn't get a code weeks before release and couldn't properly play it at launch due to the server saturation issues, so that they may do them later.
But I'm started to think some won't do the review because of being butthurted for not getting a code earlier, and because other ones may thing that once they can properly play it enough to make a review would be too late to publish it because the clicks may have moved to the next big game.
https://www.metacritic.com/game/helldivers-2/
Normally I'd say that they need more time, that more reviews should come because they didn't get a code weeks before release and couldn't properly play it at launch due to the server saturation issues, so that they may do them later.
But I'm started to think some won't do the review because of being butthurted for not getting a code earlier, and because other ones may thing that once they can properly play it enough to make a review would be too late to publish it because the clicks may have moved to the next big game.
Maybe for the better. No one gives a fuck at this point. The game is performing as a 90+ game.
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