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.