6 ms·

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the

• rincebrain 10mo ago
  A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.
  • brainzap 10mo ago
    oh no
  • jfindper 10mo ago
    I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.) Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?
    • darthcircuit 10mo ago
      Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game. You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2. The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for instance. Ice + air is a focused blizzard, etc. there’s hundreds to learn and that’s your main weapon in the game. There’s even a spell you can cast that will randomly kick someone you’re playing with out of the game. It’s great fun with friends, but can be annoying to play sometimes. If you try it, go with kb/m. It supports controller, but is way more difficult to build the spells.
      • finalarbiter 10mo ago
        > maybe something else Water, Life, Arcane, Shield, Lightning, Cold, Fire, and Earth. [0] It's worth noting that, though you can combine most of the elements to form new spells (and with compounding effects, for example wetting or steaming an enemy enhances lightning damage), you cannot typically combine opposites like lightning/ground, which will instead cancel out. Killed myself many times trying to cast lightning spells while sopping wet. In my experience, though, nobody used the element names—my friends and I just referred to them by their keybinds. QFASA, anyone? [0] https://magicka.fandom.com/wiki/Elements https://magicka.fandom.com/wiki/Elements
        • jamesgeck0 10mo ago
          This is the most Helldivers 2 part for me. Spells being intentionally tricky to execute, combined with accidental element interactions and "friendly fire."
        • darthcircuit 10mo ago
          Thank you! I haven’t played in probably more than ten years. Makes me want to fire it up for old times sake!
    • rincebrain 10mo ago
      Oh, it's not bad or janky (...okay, no, it was in some ways janky, but on purpose), I loved that game. But the sense of humor/tone between the two games is very visibly the same thing.
  • moritonal 10mo ago
    Oh my, I loved that game! It's wild everyone's throwing shade at Helldivers whilst ignoring that it was an massive success because of how fun it is. I've said it before, Dev's are really bad at understanding the art of making Fun experiences.
  • SpaceManNabs 10mo ago
    Is that a negative? All of the "negative" things listed make me think that they are really cool and trying to learn stuff and challenge things.
    • rincebrain 10mo ago
      It's not a negative, at all. I just shared it because it's sort of like learning Slack started life as the internal communication tooling for the online game glitch, or that a lot of the "weird Twitter" folks started life as FYAD posters - once you know that, you can draw the lines between the two points.
  • Zarathruster 10mo ago
    Yeah the "Crash to Desktop" comedy spell wasn't added to the game for no good reason. I do credit their sense of humor about it though.
• delichon 10mo ago
  Thank you for your service in keeping the galaxy safe for managed democracy.
• chamomeal 10mo ago
  The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game. When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp. Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
  • whalesalad 10mo ago
    It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.
  • speeder 10mo ago
    All other games from the same studio have the same features. In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
    • heftig 10mo ago
      The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it. The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.
      • throwaway902984 10mo ago
        Just accidentally smashed some teammates with an eagle napalm instead of eagle smoke before I saw this.
• philistine 10mo ago
  You put the nail on the head with the first Pokémon, but Helldivers 2 is an order of magnitude smaller in the amateur-to-success ratio. Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise. Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.
• heftig 10mo ago
  The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game. As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.
  • embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.
    • heftig 10mo ago
      To be clear, walking backwards (away from the target) reduced your bullet velocity relative to the target, reducing the damage you were doing and leading to you needing more shots.
      • embedding-shape 10mo ago
        And to be extra clear, either way, neither options makes me believe it was an intentional design choice.
        • thunderfork 10mo ago
          Systems-driven gameplay is an intentional design choice all unto itself
          • embedding-shape 10mo ago
            Sure, but that doesn't mean every consequence of that choice is suddenly intentional as well.
• FieryMechanic 10mo ago
  A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes. The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others. The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire rates and stealth is an option in the game. The game has a decent community and people friendly for the most part, it also has the "feature" of being able to be played for about 20-40 minutes and you can just put it down again for a bit and come back.
  • heftig 10mo ago
    The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.
    • FieryMechanic 10mo ago
      I also think that the tutorial would be tedious if it went through too much of the mechanics. They show you the basics, the rest you pick up through trial and error.
      • red-iron-pine 10mo ago
        aye. give me the 3 minute tutorial, not the 37 minute tutorial. i want to play the game, like now, and i'll read the forums after i figure out that i'm missing something imporant
    • banannaise 10mo ago
      Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways. The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay. I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.
• embedding-shape 10mo ago
  This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid off, and of course there is always 100s of more important tasks to do before launching a game, but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.
  • everdrive 10mo ago
    >but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something. More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)
    • embedding-shape 10mo ago
      > More or less nothing is optimized these days Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games. > I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.
      • everdrive 10mo ago