Sony has been laying out exclusive flop after flop
(twitter.com)
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They're really up a creek on one of their previous cash cows right now in the form of Helldivers 2. The devs have once again royally pissed off the player base. Revenue is down, and the game is getting review bombed hard.
Sony is not having a good 20s so far.
Helldivers 2 has solid gameplay but I couldn't be arsed to replay pointless missions over and over again with no end in sight. If it had a solid campaign to play through like the classic Halo Trilogy (+ODST) then I would probably replay it a lot, especially if the unlocks carried over like in Resident Evil games.
As everyone else has said in this thread, Sony has easy ways to make money, but they're intent on pushing the progressive agenda at the expense of all else.
I've never really enjoyed timed objectives, and most of the enemies are just bullet sponges.
The problem is that the only properly designed enemies in the game are the bugs, since they have appropriate reactions and physics that are appropriate to a lot of the weaponry. They feel mostly balanced (from last I played).
The other enemies, as you noted, are the most annoying kind of bullet sponges. Especially whatever those new zombie enemies are. They just aren't fun to fight.
But I'm guessing young people with more time than smarts see new content and eat up the slop, regardless of how poorly balanced it is.
Not only that, but the Illuminate, the zombies, have a problem where the storyteller of the game spawns them directly behind you in 15 man squads seconds after you look away. They've never even attempted to fix that but as of now.
If Helldivers 2 was built around a campaign, people would play through the campaign and then stop playing the game. Everyone wants an endless game, but no one wants the systems or mechanics necessary to create an endless game. The only way to generate endless content on the fly is AI, and people don't want that either.
Also, players throwing massive tantrums over intelligent nerfs are fucking idiots. When confronted with game balance outliers, most players think devs should just "buff everything else" and then "buff the content". This is about 10x as much work just to arrive at the same place. The only difference is that the players are spared the realization that they were being carried by overpowered tech.
The balance in general is a joke. The bots used to have one hit KO rockets and be somewhat accurate. That got nerfed, but it was replaced with other dumb mechanics.
This is the bane of all "live service" games. Publishers want that infinite cash flow, which means newer enemies that are harder to kill than older enemies in order to give players a reason to farm more powerful and newer weapons. It's an ever-spinning hamster wheel that can never be properly balanced.
And yeah, every time I peek into whatever the players are complaining about regarding balance it's the most asinine thing imaginable. I stopped paying attention to most of it, but the last I looked the typical dompamine-addicted crowd were complaining that the hardest difficulty setting was... too difficult??!?!
Arrowhead doesn't make "intelligent nerfs". They destroy whole other systems in knee jerk reactions, because they didn't actually create the game and the guys who did quit a while ago. They barely qualify as caretakers.
Helldivers 2 will be in textbooks in the future, on how to kill a golden goose with technical debt and makework obsession with unasked for iterations.