izigame.me

I absolutely cannot recommend Helldivers 2. May liberty guide your path elsewhere.
Why?
Two words: wasted potential.

I have never seen such a horrible fall from grace since the launch of Helldivers 2. This game was constantly the talk of the town and lauded for being leagues better than other modern games with a fair price point, an exceptional gameplay loop, an engaged community, and exciting room for expansion. It was a phenomenon and strong Game of the Year contender.
Now, in August 2024, this game feels like the developers are playing practical jokes on the playerbase.
How did it fall apart? It sure wasn't Sony. It was Arrowhead themselves.
The top 3 issues:
1. Enemies are way overtuned and oppressive, most player deaths feel like cheap-shots
2. Weapons and tools to fight enemies are almost all underwhelming, anything useful is promptly nerfed by the devs
3. No progression system, minimal significant updates, and nothing to look forward to for the foreseeable future
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Enemies:

Fast, lethal, heavily-armored enemies swarm players on higher difficulties with very few options to fight back. Whenever the playerbase discovers new weapons and tactics to deal with these overpowered and annoying heavy enemies, those useful weapons are nerfed with none of the other plentiful but weak options being buffed. At this point, there is very little to effectively deal with the overabundant tanky enemies.
In the last 3 months, the devs released one of their infamous balance patches to fix this issue against both bug and bot enemies to "increase loadout variety." They said they toned down how many heavy enemies would spawn on the map... but also increase how many non-heavy enemies spawn to compensate. Sounds good, right? Wrong.
Turns out they added a very rarely seen super-heavy variant of one of the bugs that takes twice as much effort to kill to almost completely replace the previous version we were already struggling with, and the number of these new enemies was NOT toned down. Now when fighting bugs, you have more light and medium enemies then ever before, AND EVEN MORE TANKY HEAVY ENEMIES TO FIGHT WITH DOUBLE THE HEALTH. WTF.
Ok, but at least the bots were made more fair from this change, right? WRONG AGAIN.
Turns out the most challenging two bot enemy types (one that shoots rockets that ragdoll the player and the other that uses a ballistic shield and rapid-fire dead-on accurate machine gun) don't count as heavies and now are spammed WORSE THAN EVER BEFORE.
All of these changes came around the time that they also accidentally broke the enemy spawn system so that there are patrols everywhere that can spawn magically behind you and very easily call in 2-3 times more reinforcements almost instantly once they see you. The tide of enemies is endless, and this makes players feel weak and outgunned.
With the latest update this week, they added EVEN MORE heavy enemies to both factions, and almost all of them bounce and ragdoll the player around with rockets and tentacles.
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Weapons:
There has been a bizarre and ridiculous cycle of the dev team running spreadsheets on the most popular weapons and nerfing them until people stop using them. In return, they sometimes slightly buff the worst weapons in some insignificant way thinking that will "balance" the game, which ends up accomplishing nothing.
This game has tons of guns and abilities to use on enemies, but over and over and over the most useful and fun have been nerfed like this is a PvP game. Why the hell do the players ever need to be nerfed unless there are legitimate exploits being used? It makes no sense.

Railgun efficiently taking out super-heavies? *Not anymore. Armor penetration and damage heavily nerfed.
Slugger shotgun stunning devastator bots and doing big damage from mid-range? *Nope, stun and damage both nerfed.
Eruptor explosive rifle dealing huge area damage with a fun shrapnel effect? *No more shrapnel for you, damage gutted.
Quasar cannon quickly recharging and able to keep up with all the heavies? *Now it's got a much longer recharge.
Flamethrower melting through armor and dealing with hordes of enemies quickly? *Nah, now flames bounce off armor.
Flaming auto-shotgun clearing waves of bugs while still having ammo left for more? *Time for an ammo nerf.

These are just some examples of weapons that people loved that were hit hard by nerfs for no real reason, one by one. The overwhelming majority of weapons in the game do not do enough damage, do not have enough ammo, and are not fun to use.
The overwhelming hordes of overtuned enemies will overcome you on higher difficulties unless you use the very few weapons and stratagems that give you a fighting chance, and we seem to be losing more and more options with every "balance" patch.
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Content:
There have been plenty of small updates to the game since launch, but there has been absolutely zero progress made in the grand scheme of things. The game launched in January, and in August we have:
- No new enemy faction
- No Helldiver progression system
- No weapon or stratagem upgrade tree whatsoever
- No weapon attachment options
- No armor skill upgrades or design customization
- Very few viable new guns or stratagems
- Lackluster amount of Helldiver voice options
- Barely any galactic campaign events (one planet is now a black hole, that's pretty much all that has happened)
SO MUCH IS MISSING. So much time has been wasted on useless balance changes that have done far more harm than good. In the meantime, the enemies have only gotten stronger with more powerful variants and the divers haven't gotten much at all to keep up.
What is there to look forward to? How long until a REAL major update?

There seems to be no hope on the horizon for HD2.

I didn't even get into the poor performance and low stability that plagues this game. My PC feels like an oven and I crash constantly after every update. There are still game breaking bugs and glitches that crop up after updates on top of the ones that have not been fixed in many months. The dev team has dug their own graves with "known issues" lists longer than the actual content updates, which is really pathetic.
I have realized along with everyone else that there really is no end to Arrowhead's incompetence. It is very unlikely they will change this game for the better. The hype train has reached its final stop. RIP Helldivers 2.