If you've been following the Helldivers 2 news, you'll know that Arrowhead Games is on a democracy-sanctioned mission to turn the ship around and, fair play, appears to have been doing a solid job of it so far.
A huge, buff-heavy balance patch arrived last month. In short, it made a wider variety of loadouts viable for most players, meaning you're no longer hemmed into a few specific weapon choices for missions—something that goes against the game's overall strengths and its Warbonds structure. Despite losing a fair bit of its difficulty, this appears to have been a judicious trade.
But that's just step one of the plan. As the now-CEO Shams Jorjani promised back in August, Helldivers 2 is on a self-imposed 60-day timer to get the game all fixed for a bright future. Well, it's October 11 now, and it was August 13 then, meaning that the end of that wait is just around the corner. October 12 to be precise.
Alas, that 60-day timer is now a 63-day timer. Egads, shock and horror, broken promises! Well, not really—turns out, it's more a mishap of scheduling than development. See, tomorrow is the weekend, and Arrowhead doesn't patch its game on weekends because, well, that's when everyone's busy playing it, and patches have a habit of breaking stuff.
That's as explained via an announcement posted to the studio's Twitter by CCO Johan Pilestedt and design director Niklas Malmborg. "We didn't look at the calendar," admits Pilestedt. "It's on a Saturday, and we don't patch during weekends, because we don't wanna break the game while you're playing the game."
Helldivers, tune in for some important updates about our upcoming 60(3?) Day Patch and have a sneak peek at what's to come. pic.twitter.com/w5okGZr41AOctober 11, 2024
Instead, Arrowhead is gonna skip the weekend and drop the patch on Tuesday. While that's technically cheating by snagging one day extra, it is in keeping with the studio's usual release cadence—which is a fancy way of saying that it usually drops patches on Tuesdays. The last few patches, for example, arrived September 24, September 17, and August 20, all released on the favourite day of the germanic god of war Tīw (or Mars, if you ask the Romans).
"We'll leave you with some sneak peaks of our most exciting changes," says Malmborg. Those changes include the Autocannon getting its own flak explosion, which I can only assume will function like the Eruptor. The Recoilless Rifle, bane of Automaton dropships everywhere, is getting "programmable ammo", whatever that means, and the Scorcher will gain an automatic fire mode.
Something is happening to the Stalwart, but they don't elaborate what, and your drone backpacks can now be recalled in cases where you're fretting over friendly fire.
Personally, I think my rover accidentally lasering my mates to death was part of its incorrigible charm, but otherwise things are looking pretty good for ol' Helldivers 2, which I never believed quite dead (10,000 players is a healthy enough playerbase for anything that's not Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft) but has certainly had its problems since its release last year. The culmination of Jorjani's 60-day march to glory should, fingers crossed, arrive October 15.
