Helldivers 2's latest update looks like it's gone down smooth, with player counts not seen since June—from a balance patch, no less

Helldivers 2's latest patch has, pretty comprehensively, overhauled the game's approach to difficulty, weapon balancing, and loadout variety—and it looks like it's working out pretty well for ol' Arrowhead.

While every major patch brings its own concurrent user jump, I think it's pretty notable here that this patch, as per SteamDB, has seen 24-hour peak player numbers not spied since June—over 68,000 players, which is a heck of a lot for a Tuesday night. It's since dipped back down to 25,000, though I'm willing to bet that's because people need to, y'know, sleep and/or go to work.

Those are some huge numbers for what is, essentially, a balance update. Escalation of Freedom, which saw new enemy types and objectives added, topped out at a 61,000 bump before the game dwindled to a cosy (but still not dead, no matter what the peanut gallery says) average of around 20,000 to 10,000 players.

At a glance, community response seems to be very positive, too. The game's subreddit has been overtaken with praise—my favourite being this pitch-perfect use of one of my favourite Avatar: The Last Airbender scenes.

Are we reaching "Were So Back" levels once more? from r/Helldivers

"I keep one-shotting Bile Titans with my recoilless rifle and every single time the trailer just plays in the back of my head," one player writes, adding: "I am at peace." In a separate thread, user CivilBreak137 adds: "Most fun I ever had playing helldivers. Everytime I died was because of an issue that I made, and not something stupid like getting one tapped in the head."

Steam reviews, while they've not reached quite the same volume as those piled onto the game after Sony's PSN meddling, are largely positive, too. Taking a peek at the helpful-rated user reviews coming in today, there's a strong sentiment of 'we're so back!' doing the rounds, with negative reviews spawning from players still frustrated with Arrowhead's prior treatment, more than anything to do with the patch itself.

It's genuinely nice to see democracy's bravest soldiers actually happy for once. Helldivers 2 has had a very bumpy ride, going from servers buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands of players to historic review bombing and a controversy every other week.

It'll take some time to see if Arrowhead falls back on old habits or not but, for the time being, it looks like going for buffs, not nerfs has paid off. All Arrowhead's got to tie up now is a harder difficulty for the pure masochists and the long-awaited return of the Illuminate to fully turn this Super Destroyer around.