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.
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.