Skip to main content

Helldivers 2’s big update is already going over well with fans

Two soldiers clasping hands in Helldivers 2.
Sony Interactive Entertainment

Helldivers 2 got the big update players have been waiting for on Tuesday, addressing a litany of issues with balance and difficulty. And for the first time in a while, fans seem to be reacting positively to the game.

Patch 1.001.100 is a big aspect of Arrowhead Game Studios’ 60-day plan to address feedback and build back some goodwill after a series of updates made the game too difficult for many players. It’s a huge update, so we won’t get into all the fixes, but the highlights include overhauls to 31 weapons, 11 stratagems, 15 enemies, the Helldivers themselves, and planet modifiers like heat and cold. There’s also a new Galactic War map that displays the locations of important assets, and an emote wheel that allows players to equip four emotes at a time.

Recommended Videos

The consensus among the most vocal of the fanbase was that some tweaks to weapons and stratagems over the months since launch made the game less engaging, and made the game more difficult for difficulty’s sake. Players also suggested that the developers weren’t listening to what the players wanted and were instead making arbitrary balance changes. August’s Escalation of Freedom update was particularly unpopular, nerfing incendiary weapons like flamethrowers to make them less effective against Terminids and other armored enemies.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Over the past week, Arrowhead released news on one big change per day in its Discord and X, with the first being increased damage for flamethrowers, and a rollback to pre-Escalation of Freedom changes for incendiary weapons. The railgun, easily the weapon that has been messed up the most from a player standpoint, has also gotten a massive damage boost, while the breaker can now hold more ammo, the arc thrower has an increased range and can deal more damage, and the eruptor has gotten its shrapnel back. Finally, the Eagle 500kg bomb stratagem has a larger explosion radius.

“So, what’s changing? For all the bugdivers out there, many situations were previously either resolved with your primary weapon or anti-tank weapons, which haven’t always performed as expected. With the overwhelming presence of Bile Titans and Chargers, many weapon choices therefore became invalid,” the patch notes read. “We’ve reworked armor penetration, anti-tank weapons, enemy armor and health values. Our goal is to improve the effectiveness of weapons such as the Autocannon, Heavy Machine Gun, Flamethrower, and Anti-Materiel Rifle against heavily armored enemies.”

So far, this patch has gone over well with the player base. SteamDB puts the 24-hour concurrent player peak at 68,380, which is the highest number the game has registered in over three months. (Although this could be because people are checking out the updates, not that they’ve been convinced to return.) The subreddit also appears to be reacting positively, with some joking that there are almost too many good gameplay strategies to try.

But has the update made the game too easy? Chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt has been interacting with users on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, and agrees that the game does need a harder difficulty tier.

I agree!

— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) September 17, 2024

Pilestedt noted that the team is looking into “the challenge of the game for those high tier players,” along with the jump pack.

Carli Velocci
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
The biggest gaming news of 2024: Concord flops, Palworld vs. Nintendo, and more
A pal aiming a gun in Palworld.

2024 was a rough year for the game industry. It was dominated by layoffs, significant strategic shifts from some of the biggest companies in the industry, and gigantic live service flops that demonstrated just how hard that space is to break into. In last year's iteration of this article, I wrote that it felt like I was covering a "video game industry bound to head into an odd 2024 that lacks the known quantity bombshells of this year and continues to reel from layoffs." That certainly proved to be true.

That's not to say it was all dour. Some fantastic games were released, with some surprise viral successes like Palworld and Black Myth: Wukong showing how the right games since have the potential to resonate with millions of players. The video game industry is hurting, though, and looking toward 2025, the launch of Nintendo Switch's successor and Grand Theft Auto VI will have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get the industry out of this rut. These news stories shaped the video game industry's tumultuous 2024.
Layoffs did not slow down

Read more
Helldivers 2 is getting a surprising Killzone crossover
High res key art for Helldivers 2- Escalation of Freedom.

Helldivers 2 has been nothing short of a runaway success. Fans have wanted more options for character customization, including crossover events. A thread on the Helldivers subreddit from nine months ago asks: "Do you think Helldivers 2 will get crossover content?" Well, the answer is now yes, courtesy of a new DLC pack featuring Killzone 2 items.

Arrowhead, the development team behind Helldivers 2, announced the collaboration in a Steam post. The team wrote: "We decided a long time ago to do crossovers only if and when they make perfect sense for the game. So in that spirit, we're hyped to announce our very first crossover: Killzone 2."

Read more
This new Alien game will tide you over until Alien: Isolation 2
Key art for Alien: Rogue Incursion

It’s hard to believe it has been over a decade since the release of Alien: Isolation. No Alien game since then has matched the intensity of its survival horror focus. Slowly creeping around a space station, only to be ambushed by a Xenomorph and engage in a cat-and-mouse chase in hopes of survival, is an exhilarating experience that no other Alien game has quite been able to achieve. Unfortunately, Sega and Creative Assembly did not immediately start work on a follow-up; it was only this year that we learned a sequel is in the works.

That Alien: Isolation sequel is still years away at this point, but thankfully, a different Alien game is here for players looking for another Xenomorph-filled first-person shooter. It’s a new VR game from Survios called Alien: Rogue Incursion, and it's your best bet for that Alien horror short of replaying the original Alien: Isolation as we wait for its sequel.

Read more