Seldom does a game force itself into a redemption arc, but Helldivers 2 seems to have done just that. After a stellar launch, it suffered heavily from incessant nerfs and Sony shenanigans, but is finally seeing better days as devs continue to issue nothing but buffs and improvements.
This rhetoric took new form in the most recent Helldivers 2 update launched on Sept. 17. It reworked most weapons, enemies, and systems, primarily nerfing the defenses of numerous burly opponents, while giving many guns a ton of much-needed attention and love through great buffs to make them more effective against all enemies. The developers have been issuing buffs for a while now, though this latest patch is probably their best single buff drop since the game was released. Even the 500KG Bomb Strategem has been fixed and will now explode as much as one would expect it to with that blast radius.
And, of course, the community is beyond happy, giddy even, because of all the positive changes. The game’s player count has more than doubled since only yesterday, and now sits at about 50,000 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. The game averaged about 20,000 or fewer concurrent players during peak hours in the days prior to this massive patch, which goes to show how much players were eager to return to the title, but were prevented by the borderline-unfun weapon balance.
Over on the game’s subreddit, a community of over 1.5 million players has been singing unanimous praises to the developers for all the new and improved weapons in the game. “I’m excited to try everything out again,” said one rejoicing player, while another quoted the Planet of the Apes and shouted proudly: “What a wonderful day!”
“We are so back boys,” said yet another excited Helldiver.
While the topic of the buffs is certainly exciting, there still remains one jarring problem that Arrowhead cannot possibly fix no matter how many updates it churns out. That is, of course, the issue of the PSN region lock that is to this day preventing players in 170 countries and territories from purchasing the title. The game remains in the PlayStation Network jail imposed on it by Sony after a failed attempt at making the player base create a PSN account to continue playing the title months after its actual release.
Weapons can be buffed, new enemies and content introduced, but so long as the game remains inaccessible to millions, it won’t be able to complete its self-imposed story of redemption.
