Summary
- Critical information in Helldivers 2 is hard to find without consulting external sources like Reddit, Discord, or the wiki, making it near impossible for casual players to engage with the game meaningfully.
- Players risk missing game-changing bonuses due to lack of in-game notifications and unclear UI design, and are calling for developer Arrowhead to make crucial information clearer.
- Arrowhead's temporary fixes for missing information are helping to some degree, but a more comprehensive overhaul of the UI is sorely needed to make it less hostile to new and returning players.
I love , despite 168澳洲幸✅运5开奖网:not typically playing live-service games. It was barely a blip on my radar when I first heard of the game at 2023 showcase, though I was intrigued by its clearly satirical tone. Against all odds, upon release, it slowly be𝄹gan to 🍷take over my gaming time – I’d log in every day just to finish my personal order and contribute a little to whatever war effort was going on, because I was invested in the constantly evolving storyline.
But Helldivers 2 Has Plenty Of Problems
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I💟’ve become more disillusioned with it over time, as is often the case with live-service games. While the game itself is generally a lot of fun, some of the biggest issues with Helldivers 2 lie in how much information is lost to players if they aren’t consulting outside sources. Want to know about the lore? Good luck, you’re going to have to look up the wiki. Want to know about what enemies you’re facing and their traits? Well, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:there’s no codex, so… check Reddit, I guess. Want to know which planet it makes the most strategic sense to attack first? 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:There’s no centralised community to strategise with, and you need to take supply lines into account, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:which aren’t represented💖 in the game itself.
That means that if you’re a casual player who isn’t constantly trawling the Helldivers 2 subreddit and server, a lot of this information is completely unknown to you. That’s a huge problem. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:latest call for in-game tutorials relating to the game’s mechanics has come in response to a new revelation: planets with SEAF bases under Super Earth’s control actually grant a percentage bonus towards liberating all planets. When they get overrun by enemies, that bonus is lost permanently, since the ba⛎se gets destroyed. This happened on Vernen Wells, where players had no idea that the bonus would be lost, if they knew there was a bonus at all.
Arrowhead Is Using Stopgap Measures
This information was technically given to players in an in-game dispatch, which I’m sure everybody is🥂 reading, right? One dispatch says that the Terminids are attacking Angel’s Venture, and if they succeed, the Training Facility on that planet would be destroyed and this would “significantly decreaꦡse the capability of the SEAF to aid in galactic defence”. The dispatch ends with a recommendation that Helldivers prioritise the defence of Angel’s Venture.
This dispatch is a clear stopgap measure from the developers, a way to tell players that they should care about this. Unfortunately, part of the problem is that considering Helldivers 2’s meta form of storytelling, it can be hard to tell if this bonus is an abstract bonus that’s just a part of the story, or if it’s a numbers-based bonus tha🍌t materially impacts gameplay. It turns out it’s the latter, but it’s not ridiculous to think that players overlooked this information because they thought it wasn’t important. This dispatch helps mitigate that to some extent by offering concrete instructions to players, but it’s not enough.
Another issue is that if you miss the dispatch because you hav📖en’t played for a while, you’re not going to have a clue what’s going on. You might not know what an SEAF base even is if you missed those Major Orders and don’t keep up with the lore when you’re not actively playing. There’s no in-gaꦍme log of this information, and there are no indicators in the UI to show which planets have bases on them or what bonuses they’re offering.
While in-game text notifications help to draw attention to those planets, tweaks to the UI could be made to highlight priority planets. Just off the top of m♈y head, I would appreciate it if planets at high risk of being overrun were highlighted on the Galactic Map when viewing it from a macro scale, perhaps with sectors being highlighted or just an exclamation mark over those planets. Defence campaigns are often taking place in sectors apart from planets implicated in Major Orders as well, and tend to get overlooked because there’s no reason to click around through other sectors.
For that matter, I often forget which planets are in which sectors and have to take time searching for them in the map. Su🌠rely there’s a way to make this clearer.
I’m aware that Arrowhead has a lot on its plate – with players upset about haphazard weapon nerfing, the PSN controversy still not entirely fixed, and the quality of Warbonds being called into question, it’ll be hard for the studio to resolve all its issues in a short timeframe. But this feels like something that needs to be fixed, especially if the studio wants to bring new players into the fold. I’d go so far as to say I wish this was something that had been implemented from launch, but there’s no point complaining about that now. The best t𝓰ime to have these features would have been months a🦩go, but the second-best time is now.
Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.
