Author: [email protected] (Morgan Park)
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The Helldivers 2 dev who got downvoted to oblivion is right: We need to chill out about balance in a 4-week-old game
For some, it’s safe to say the Helldivers 2 honeymoon is over. Yesterday Arrowhead released its first balance patch, which finally made orbital strikes more consistent and the Flamethrower a legitimate powerhouse. It also nerfed the most popular equipment in the game, the Railgun and shield backpack. Guess how that went down with players who’ve…
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The worst Helldivers 2 weapon has become one of the best overnight
The Railgun has been dethroned. The one-shot-kill support weapon that could tear through enemies of every toughness at a steady pace has been brought back down to Super Earth with nerfs to its penetration and non-weak-point damage. With the power vacuum left in its wake, helldivers across the galaxy have gone back to the drawing…
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Unreleased Helldivers 2 vehicles are leaking all over the place, but I’m not ruling out that Game Master Joel has something to do with it
The Super Earth mothership is springing leaks. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios has talked openly about how unprepared it was for Helldivers 2’s massive popularity at launch, so it’s fair to assume it also didn’t anticipate how motivated fans would be to find out what’s coming next. In the past week, videos of players accessing unreleased…
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Helldivers 2 players are arguing over playing casually or sticking to the ‘meta,’ and they’re both right
Is Helldivers 2 a competitive game? It’s a fair question to ask about the surprise smash hit of 2024, and one its burgeoning community doesn’t fully agree on. Some are diving deep into its arsenal to suss out the most lethal guns, destructive stratagems, and best mission types to farm for medals and Req. They…
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Helldivers 2 players become part Automaton by mapping stratagems to a Stream Deck
Think fast! A 12-foot-tall Charger is on a collision course with your brittle helldiver body. Your guns won’t scratch its armored carapace, but a quick airstrike could stop it in its tracks. Worry not, follow these convenient Super Earth-supplied instructions for calling down life-saving support at a moment’s notice: just hold CTRL, then press right,…
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‘We have an actual person with the title of Game Master’: A single Helldivers 2 dev named Joel is pulling the strings on its galactic war like an all-powerful D&D dungeon master, war will become ‘more and more sophisticated over time’
Helldivers 2’s galactic war is much more than a mission selector. In a short time, players have become invested in the status of their favorite planets and reacted to gains and losses in a sector’s liberation. The simulated conflict playing out both in-game and on social media has become an unexpected focal point of the…
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Rainbow Six Siege’s next operator brings back a classic Rainbow Six character nobody’s heard from in 20 years
When it comes to covering Rainbow Six Siege on the internet, there are two types of commenters: those with strong opinions about balancing decisions, and those who like to reminisce about classic Rainbow Six. Despite never playing the original singleplayer Rainbow Six trilogy myself, through osmosis I’ve learned of the legendary exploits of John Clark,…
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Rainbow Six Siege director says making a sequel after 9 years would be a mistake: ‘I’m not going to name names, but you see games go through sequels and just completely drop the ball’
Rainbow Six Siege turns nine years old in 2024, but in live service terms, it’s more like 90. When Ubisoft’s 5v5 FPS first released in 2015, Overwatch was still months away, PUBG didn’t exist, and Fortnite was a zombie game we thought might never come out. Siege has been doing the live service game longer…
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Helldivers 2 was built on an obscure Swedish engine discontinued in 2018: ‘Our crazy engineers had to do everything with no support’
You’ve heard of Unreal Engine and Unity, two engine juggernauts that power most of your Steam library, but you’ve probably never heard of Bitsquid. It was an obscure game engine used in a handful of notable Swedish indies of the early 2010s. In 2014, Autodesk bought Bitsquid, renamed it Autodesk Stingray, then discontinued it in…
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Helldivers 2 patch ‘tunes’ those civilian extract missions that were murdering everyone as Arrowhead continues to manage login queues
Last week, Helldivers 2’s simulated galactic war saw its first narrativized twist when the Automaton menace launched a surprise attack on the Xzar system. The event unlocked new planets and civilian extraction missions which proved so difficult that even experienced players couldn’t complete them. This led many to assume the abnormal difficulty spike was either…