Helldivers 2 being review bombed by the Chinese.
(media.scored.co)
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Some context.
Since the start of Helldivers 2, the devs unwisely let slip they had a narrative manager called Joel. Joel is in charge of determining where the story goes and tweaks things such as enemy strength to make things more cinematic. In other words, he's a Game Master and the meta is more on-rails than Amtrack. Planets that the community should have taken become strangely impossible to take and vice-versa. We have virtually no real impact on the story.
Keeping that in mind, it was obvious where the recent attack on Super-Earth was going to go. We were going to lose every Mega City except one and then win the fight at the last second for that cinematic moment all Game Masters really like (but players rebel against).
Enter - The Chinese.
One of the Mega Cities (and one of the last ones standing) was located in China. So, they went to work trying to keep hold of the city for the glory of their culture. Then they noticed that no matter how much they rallied, the numbers weren't adding up.
China discovered the meta. And they are not happy.
End result: The devs must have noticed because two Mega Cities survived the invasion instead of one and the game currently sits at Mixed.
If they advertise a feature of players altering the story then try to cheat it they deserve the bad reviews.
It was inevitable they'd put their thumb on the scale. If not manually than via algorithm.
Arrowhead's had their thumb on the scale since day 1.
Yeah, if you're doing things that way, you have to set things up to be flexible. Have a flowchart ahead of time. (engineer your final event so that it can occur in a number of different cites, have special, minor events to step up difficulty in non-final cities that don't fall until finally the difficulty becomes too much, or just put the final event on the moon or somewhere else location independant, so it doesn't matter which city is the last one.)
Really just seems like a misstep. Sure, the Chinese overreact, but they do have a point in this case. Getting your players invested by having their actions change the outcome, and then railroading them is rarely a winning move. I thought Mass Effect taught us this years ago.
I kinda get it. I don't even necessarily think that the problem here is that the Game Master manages the meta, the problem is that the Game Master is fucking up the meta. You want player engagement like that. FFS, your invading Earth. This would be the exact time to let the players have a heroic defense in the story. There's all sorts of ways to tell a story that moves around with a bit of player input but gets you to where you want to go.
On rails or not, the issue is bad story-telling.
If player choice is a feature then there's no excuse not to build branching paths into your story, whether in vidya or tabletop. If I ever had a GM like that I'd tell him to his face "why don't we just go watch a movie instead of playing pretend in your fantasy fan fiction?"
Even if your not gonna do branching paths, there's still "rolling with it". If they make progress, don't shut it down just because you're not being imaginative.
I haven't played it but the impressions I had along with this story it sounds like their bad reviews may be deserved. I don't even like in single player games where I'm doing really well and then "oh wait scripted sequence look at my power you lose even though you spent the last ten minutes kicking my ass"
that's... extremely misleading.
the real problem wasn't even close to this and was partly related to the IQ of bugmen, partly related to translation issues. in English, the little explanation for what the % meter was "% Held", which shows how close the Illuminate were to destroying the city, but it's not that at 100% you'd stop the invasion... they were coming constantly and had to be held back for the duration of the event.
in Chinese, this was "% Defense Success" (or something of the sort), leading the chinks to believe that upon reaching 100% they would liberate the whole city and end the invasion. of course, it got seemingly stuck at 98.9% or something because it didn't work that way, but the messy translation coupled with all of these chinese being stupid and unable to read up on how things worked made them think it was rigged.
if Joel wanted it rigged he would have bumped up the invasion strength 10x so the city would fall for that climactic last stand, instead it was held the entire time. it's the opposite of what the review bombers think happened.
I hate the condescension of the media referring to negative reviews as review bombing. People are allowed to not like things. It isn't up to the media to decide if the reasons for disliking something is legitimate or not.
Lol half of Chinese population makes less than $200 a month, there are 12mil college graduates this year but with only 10% employment rate, all the export factories are shutting down, the real estate markets in major cities are collapsing and lost more than 50% of the purchase value, just let them have a rare virtual w in their miserable lives
https://tenor.com/bQhBu.gif
It’s been an open secret for awhile.
I stopped playing after they added homing-flaming-tornados that covered the extraction point for 5-10 minutes till everyone died. Then the devs had the audacity to claim they didn’t do just that.
This sounds neat, can you go into more detail?
Idk how people can play the same shoot em up vs waves of AI for months and months?
Its a coop game. You have fun memeing and playing with your bros or randos, and "winning" is often a secondary objective to just having a hilarious time.
And at some point playing it becomes so second nature that you don't need to really engage your brain, meaning it becomes a great "after work, relaxer" type game. Where you pop in before bed to settle down with a few quick matches, and then save the really try-hard stuff for the weekend.
I just lose interest in this type of game. Its been out for like 2 years already
I did as well, but I have my own versions of it throughout my life. Funnily enough the original Darkest Dungeon became my "do a run before bed to unwind" game and I ended up with hundreds of hours in it.
These games in particular keep baiting people back with battlepasses and other seasonal content, which at least keeps you working towards something to give it reason to come back.
I thought it played well but there were like 4 missions that repeated over and over in samey planets so I just stopped.
It can become like comfort food I think. Like watching your favorite show. Some games can also give huge amounts of guns, skills, and melee to change it up a decent amount. That way it still feels different.
it's not a bullet hell or just L4D where 90% of the enemies are the same zombie. there's a lot of equipment that handles a lot of ways against enemies that move and act in a lot of ways, so coordinating with friends to take that on is very fun.
Kind of ended up with the same feelings.
It was fun for a while, but there was no real progress and nothing really mattered, and the maps were a bit too sparse for my liking. Felt too contained.
Who's Line if it Anyway was less rigged than this game.