If masking Helldivers 2 this yr has taught me something, it is that balancing a horde shooter is monstrously onerous—beginning with an unpopular main stability patch that dented the Railgun, it wasn’t till this month that, after a giant overhaul, Arrowhead began hitting the mark once more. So to see House Marine 2 now operating into the identical issues has given me an disagreeable sense of intergalactic déjà vu.
Late final week, Saber Interactive launched a patch retooling the problem for Operations, that are the sport’s multiplayer mode—on the plus aspect, there is a new Operation for gamers to get pleasure from, reward the emperor, in addition to a brand new problem mode. Difficulty being, that problem mode’s unpopular for a few causes.
Named “Lethality”, this problem makes Ammo Crate refills restricted per participant, and severely nerfs your armour regen should you aren’t near your mates. Whereas these items do technically make the sport more durable, synthetic useful resource shortage in a sport about mowing down hordes of enemies is not nice, and the sport’s lessons are designed to function at completely different ranges. The Sniper, for example, is supposed to… y’know, snipe.
That ammo crate factor additionally applies to Ruthless (the problem tier under it) as properly, alongside a unilateral 15% discount in participant armour. Mix that with some nerfs to boss-killing techniques, and you’ve got a recipe for catastrophe.
Trying on the group response, the primary challenge appears to be an analogous one to Helldivers 2—in that these makes an attempt to ramp up the problem utterly clothesline playstyles and slim gamers into a particular set of meta-appropriate containers, else they undergo annoying harm sponges:
“Why are they forcing gamers to remain collectively? How would that work for a group of assault, vanguard and sniper?” Writes one participant on the sport’s subreddit, earlier than noting that one operation even requires the group to separate up. In the identical thread, the appropriately-named MrTactician sums it up fairly properly:
“In a PvE sport, gamers HATE all of the sudden performing worse by no fault of their very own, it merely would not really feel good. Please watch out with the following patch, I don’t want one other Helldivers disaster as a result of the stability group feels that we’re having enjoyable within the improper means.”
This has led to a petite evaluation bomb on Steam, too. Whereas it is nothing like the large hits Helldivers 2 tanked again within the day, the spike’s nonetheless considerable. Between October 17 and the time of writing, the sport has obtained 1,774 optimistic evaluations and a couple of,431 adverse ones. As one participant with over 100 hours writes on the brand new ‘stick with the group’ mechanic:
“This mechanic is without doubt one of the most confusingly misplaced approaches to growing problem I’ve ever seen. It disregards the core pillars of the sport’s fight circulation and appears to have been carried out in a state of confusion the place the builders forgot that sure lessons are designed to be performed at completely different ranges from one another.”
Fortunately, Saber Interactive appears to have recognised there’s an issue. As written on the writer Focus Leisure’s X account: “We carefully learn your suggestions relating to the newest patch … we’re actively engaged on one other one together with balancing fixes. It ought to launch subsequent week.” That’ll probably be Thursday, if the studio’s launch schedule is to be adopted, although there’s the likelihood it pushes it sooner.
Truthfully, seeing historical past repeat itself with one more horde shooter sport is a head-scratcher. If Helldivers 2 has proven me something, it is that making an attempt to stability your sport about mowing down aliens by making gamers really feel constrained, quite than highly effective? It’s going to solely finish in tears. Particularly in a House Marine sport, the place you are meant to be taking part in a genetically-modified tremendous soldier with three lungs—being slightly OP is a part of the fantasy. This is hoping Saber Interactive can course-correct with out the months of drama Arrowhead suffered.