Helldivers 2 balancing has sometimes "gone too far", CEO admits

Arrowhead CEO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has said that, at times, the team has "gone too far" when trying to balance the game.

Pilestedt's comments come in response to one Helldivers 2 player, who said they were no longer finding the game fun due to balance changes. In fact, they felt the game had become "unplayable" with the amount of changes over recent months.

"Yeah I think we've gone too far in some areas," the CEO subsequently replied, adding he will now talk to the rest of the team about its approach to in-game balancing. "It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed," Pilestedt said.

When another commenter said they felt every weapon in the game has at some point been nerfed, and as a result a lot of the fun had been removed, Pilestedt acknowledged "that's not a great feeling".

In another post on this thread, Pilestedt said he has been seeing "a bit too much balancing using damage instead of other measures such as recoil, reload speeds, accuracy, projectile speeds and equip speeds". He said that "just tweaking damage numbers is a blunt tool".

While Pilestedt never referenced a specific weapon nerf during this exchange, there have recently been a number of discussions about Helldivers 2's R-36 Eruptor and its shrapnel damage over on the Discord.

As a reminder, a couple of days ago the Helldivers 2 team released a patch, with one of the fixes being the removal of shrapnel from the R-36 Eruptor. "This is to avoid cases in which players would randomly one-shot themselves or their teammates in a huge radius around the explosion," the notes explained. But, some weren't happy about this change, and let the team know.

The game's senior game designer Alexus Kravchenko, who calls himself the 'Bringer of Balance' on Discord, responded to this discussion stating he "[knows] some people would like a black and white picture and still think that we nerf weapons because they're too fun, but the situation is a bit more complicated".

Said Kravchenko: "So here's what I think we should do: We can't bring the shrapnel back the way it was. We don't want it to oneshot chargers, and we don't [want] it to have a chance to kill you or your teammates (we have a cluster eagle for that). I still strongly believe that the Eruptor benefits from dealing less damage more consistently. So: it's a net minus if you're lucky or are using an exploit, and net plus otherwise.

"However we're still investigating if this change has affected any breakpoints against medium enemies, and we will look into that. I won't promise that it will definitely be buffed, as the weapon in its current state is still absolutely viable. But it's always on our radar."

Meanwhile, as all of this balance discourse has been going on, Arrowhead has released its latest Premium Warbond: Polar Patriots.

The team recently opened a poll to see if it should delay the release of this Warbond, in reaction to the recent hoo-ha over PSN linking. However, the community voted for the Warbond to go ahead as originally planned, despite the furor that encapsulated the game over the weekend.

If you missed this particular drama, last Friday, Sony announced that Helldivers 2 players on Steam were going to be required to link to a PSN account to keep playing the game. However, following immense backlash from the game's community, it made a U-turn on these plans.