HELLDIVERS II

Posting a reupload since it doesn't have an age gate, and Invidious and Piped are not working because Google are dicks.

 
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/0...tions-and-crossplay-support-details-revealed/


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4b55Qdq3Rs

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I played the original a bit on PS4 and could never really get into it... This looks a lot more "serious" and the perspective change could make it interesting. Hopefully there's a demo available.
 
Oof, sounds like general matchmaking is fucked right now. Not a good place to start a live service game, but I'll give it a few days to marinate. Gameplay still looks/sounds great to me though.
 
There seem to be a lot of technical problems. First of all let me say the nProtect GameGuard anticheat was a horrid idea and I can only hope they get rid of it for at minimum a better client-side anticheat (VAC, or even EAC) as it has numerous problems in its history and currently in Helldivers2 such as lack of Linux/SteamOS compatibility and potential performance issues could be related; ideally, doing without client-side kernel-level anticheat entirely and using server side sanity checks to easily deal with the type of cheating of focus ina co-op game like this.

That said, there seems to be issues with matchmaking as well which is not a good look on launch day. Atop that, I personally was able to go through the training mode last night and the performance was horrible even with a 3090, 16GB of RAM, and a 5960X - massive stuttering at 4k on anything except the "low" graphics preset (setting rendering to native quality. Even trying the DLSS style settings didn't help to do anything with higher settings etc). Now, I grant this could have been a driver thing, I was using NV drivers from Oct or so of last year. So I updated them to the end of Jan ones, the latest available. Unfortunately since then i've not been able to get into the game - its a permanent black screen on load and has to be manually terminated from the process manager. There has seemingly been an update (and others were mentioning the black screen load issue) so i'll give it another shot. It may take a few days but they need to work fast, right now the game has a 'mixed' review on Steam and its not surprising with these issues. I hope they can sort them out as, at least the old Helldivers was quite fun.
 
RanceJustice said:
There seem to be a lot of technical problems. First of all let me say the nProtect GameGuard anticheat was a horrid idea and I can only hope they get rid of it for at minimum a better client-side anticheat (VAC, or even EAC) as it has numerous problems in its history and currently in Helldivers2 such as lack of Linux/SteamOS compatibility and potential performance issues could be related; ideally, doing without client-side kernel-level anticheat entirely and using server side sanity checks to easily deal with the type of cheating of focus ina co-op game like this.

That said, there seems to be issues with matchmaking as well which is not a good look on launch day. Atop that, I personally was able to go through the training mode last night and the performance was horrible even with a 3090, 16GB of RAM, and a 5960X - massive stuttering at 4k on anything except the "low" graphics preset (setting rendering to native quality. Even trying the DLSS style settings didn't help to do anything with higher settings etc). Now, I grant this could have been a driver thing, I was using NV drivers from Oct or so of last year. So I updated them to the end of Jan ones, the latest available. Unfortunately since then i've not been able to get into the game - its a permanent black screen on load and has to be manually terminated from the process manager. There has seemingly been an update (and others were mentioning the black screen load issue) so i'll give it another shot. It may take a few days but they need to work fast, right now the game has a 'mixed' review on Steam and its not surprising with these issues. I hope they can sort them out as, at least the old Helldivers was quite fun.
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Definitely agree with all of this. I was aware of GameGuard prior to purchasing (still blows my mind they chose *this* anitcheat over other more-reputable options) and have the same hopes it gets removed/replaced eventually.
 
Game looks neat but all the bugs and perf issues I'm reading have killed any interest. The anti-cheat idiocy and that they require a psn account (well for crossplay only I guess) is crazy. I have the first one but never got around to playing it.
 
Pringle said:
Definitely agree with all of this. I was aware of GameGuard prior to purchasing (still blows my mind they chose *this* anitcheat over other more-reputable options) and have the same hopes it gets removed/replaced eventually.
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I guess we'll see. Seems a real waste.

Ranulfo said:
Game looks neat but all the bugs and perf issues I'm reading have killed any interest. The anti-cheat idiocy and that they require a psn account (well for crossplay only I guess) is crazy. I have the first one but never got around to playing it.
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For what its worth, it seems they've fixed some of the technical issues. There was a significant sized patch yesterday and it overhauled many of the issues - for me, no more crash/black screen on load, even the performance is much better being able to set it at Native res (note by default it uses some sort of less than native upscaling thing it seems, DLSS or FSR but you can set it to Native or even supersampling ) and then put the specifics on the High preset with smooth play (didn't try Ultra yet). Not sure about matchmaking yet as I played yesterday evening mostly solo but others report good improvements there too - especially if you turn off cross-play some say? either way I'll check again. The anticheat is still conceptually annoying but I'll see what other issues it offers and hope they can replace it with something else.

So ultimately it seems they at least saw the issues and hurried to correct them which is a good step on the first days since launch. Now the Steam reviews are up to "Mostly Positive" and have doubled or tripled in number, so that's a start.
 
Blade-Runner said:
Urgent technical patch got issued.

https://www.techpowerup.com/318944/helldivers-2-receives-rapid-post-launch-pc-patch

My interest in this game has been dampened after learning it has both season passes and premium currency.....fucking developers/publishers never learn.
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Colonel Sanders said:
it's people who keep supporting this shit that never learn. studios would stop including these elements if people didn't gobble it up happily.
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I'm one of the biggest critics on the forum when it comes to game monetization and at least from what I've seen thus far, Helldivers 2 is at least potentially a decent balance of funding vs player value and respect for their time/wallet. It will ultimately depend on how things progress and tweaks they make. However in those dynamics mentioned, they are not like most implementations I've found

"battle/season passes" = What they call "warbonds". Rather than sequential level based unlocks, they're more like some games that have "catalogs", in that each warbond has a number of pages each with varying items - not just cosmetics like gestures or profile backgrounds, but armor/helmets, weapons, grenades , boosters and other sidegrades gearwise. Players can choose to unlock whichever items they wish on a given page, and subsequent pages are made available once a fixed amount of the unlock currency is spent, which is a good idea instead of it being a fixed "5 of 10 items unlocked for next page". A premium warbond requires payment using the "premium currency" called Super Credits which can be either earned in game through play or bought; more on that later. At the moment, it takes 1000 credits to unlock a paid "premium" warbond; I am unsure if this is the fixed price for all future or not. Once a warbond is unlocked, all the items within it are unlocked with Medals, a currency exclusively granted from playing and completing missions. It worth noting that there is no FOMO with Warbonds. Unlike most season/battle passes, once a Warbond is introduced, it will always be available for purchase. If a player purchases it, they have an unlimited amount of time to unlock the items within; nothing goes away when a season is over or the like. In fact, players can unlock as they wish from multiple warbonds ,so they don't have to assign/complete one before they can move on. In these ways they seem significantly dfferent and better vs traditional season/battle passes and lack the downsides that make them so annoying for both the player's time and money. I should also mention that at the moment there are 2 Warbonds: One called "Helldivers Mobilize" is a completely free warbond and has a ton of pages with content (looks like 10 pages, with around 8 items per pages ome may vary) including around 800 Super Credits). The other is 'Steeled Veterans" which a Premium Warbond you can either buy for 1000 (I'm told) or if you get the Deluxe/SuperCitizen version of the game it will be included. It has 3 pages and seems to offer 300 Super Credit among the other content. Supposedly they are aiming to add a new Warbond every month or two.

"Premium Currency" = Super Credits. As far as i can tell there are several types of currency in the game. Requisition is a common resource that is necessary to unlock new Strategems and perhaps most equates with 'money' in other games. There are three comparatively rarer "research" types that you can find in missions, used to upgrade your ship which among other things upgrades the quality of strategem . Medals are awarded for completing missions, with bonuses awarded for doing sequences of missions (ie it tells you ahead of time if an Operation is 2 missions etc and if you complete both you get a bigger bonus). Super Creditss are the 'premium" currency used to buy Warbond catalogs (1000 credits I think?) and the "rotating store" direct purchase items which vary in price but the most expensive I see are about 250. The important thing however is that, aside from buying them with cash , or unlocking them for Medals in a warbond, you can gain Credits in game. There are many "points of interest" in most missions, in addition to primary objectives, secondary objectives, bug hives of different sizes, and other sort of stuff out there. POIs can be all sorts of things, but many of them (indicated with a diamond icon on the map, small and in gray ) will have some sort of resource. While its not always super credits, they do seem to pop up at a reasonable rate. Each tiny vault (basically a crashed drone that your soldier salutes to open) has 10 credits within, and user are capable of finding multiple per mission if they don't mind risking the search. Even soloing on the first night or two and on easier difficulties (ie like 2 or 3 ) I was able to pick up around 50-ish credits in a couple missions; if i was with a team and more optimized it would have even been faster. In addition, I'm told that it may be possible to get greater amounts of them per resource looted on higher difficulties (unconfirmed), and I've also seen some various bunkers and vaults that require more than 1 player to get into as they have "2 or more buttons that need to be pressed at the same time"; not sure what's in there yet but someone told me there are larger Super Credit among other rewards. So if this is accurate, and users can pick up 20-30+ Credits per mission if they're so inclined, atop other forms of credit unlock like the free warbond, it seems available at a reasonable rate and is not particularly grindy as opposed to those that make it punishing specificallly to get you to buy. WIth this in mind, a relatively frequent player could easily gain 1000 credits per month (not counting those from other sources) to buy every new warbond, and/or still pick up the occasional super credit shop cosmetic if they so choose without having to spend an inordinant amount of time doing so.

So ultimately , its a bit different than what I'd expect from most freemium or live service games with item malls, battle passes an the like and certainly far from the madness of "gacha" types where you have to roll for a chance at something desirable. Of course this is only an immediate impression, how the developers choose to tweak things from here will be a major factor going forward.
 
Lateralus said:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3btXSjCl0eg
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i just don't see this guy's arguments for the monetization as being accurate. I don't think he's being dishonest but maybe doesn't understand the mechanics of how its implemented?

The accusations for P2W seem inaccurate and so do the hypothetical idea that "oh other player have a huge advantage over me because they have the premium warbond and have overpowered gear because they got the wallet out etc". Atop the fact you can earn the premium currency by playing and from the free warbond, the only "premium" content at launch is the small 3 page "steeled veterans" warbond catalog and a couple of armor/helmet sets on the rotating store. The armor on the store (and for that matter on the premium warbond) have minor benefits (and detriments - he seemed to focus on just the benefits but it seems a tradeoff like is the case with many of the armor sets I've seen regardless of origins) and are available on other suits of armor too that you can unlock in other ways, so its not like they have some exclusive super special benefit not available anywhere else. As far as the weapons on the premium warbond, again they're not particularly unique and are sidegrades; I will agree that ONE of the weapons in the premium warbond might be the fastest way to unlock something with medium armor penetration (I can't confirm this or not), but all of this is missing a major factor - medals. All the warbonds need medals in order to unlock them AND you have to actually unlock the requisite pages with previous purchases to get there too. So even someone with the premium steeled veterans warbond can't just unlock that one rifle, it costs like 80 bloody medals and you need to have spent over 200 just to get to that page if memory serves. Note that the Steeled Veterans Premium Warbond , being shorter in pages, quickyl escalates the amount of medals needed to unlock items and each page as compared to the free Helldivers Mobilize Warbond which slopes up more gradually, but is a much larger catalog. Either way, you can't just pay a bunch of credit and then have the pick of all the supposed "fancy" gear - you'll need to put in the time and gameplay to get the medals just to get to the page + buy the gear itself.

All in all, kinda disappointed with his assessment. There's stuff to criticize, but it doesn't seem like this is the more accurate or representative of the issues way to do so, especially if the "greed / p2w / microtransactions" is the primary gripe.
 
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Havent really followed this game but this gameplay footage showed on my feed (Drewski) and gotta say gameplay looks fantastic.
Like a more evolved, graphically impressive mashup of Destiny and Remnant From The Ashes, with starwars helmets. 3P coop shooters are just fun.


View: https://youtu.be/N6F_aVqXuwU
 
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Yep, really enjoying the gameplay loop. Almost at 1000 super-currency to unlock the premium warbond stuff just by putting in less than 10 hours.

These servers though, woof. I've had multiple connection issues, but hopefully they get smoothed out.
 
Pringle said:
Yep, really enjoying the gameplay loop. Almost at 1000 super-currency to unlock the premium warbond stuff just by putting in less than 10 hours.

These servers though, woof. I've had multiple connection issues, but hopefully they get smoothed out.
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Unplayable on console. Crazy from a Sony product.
 
I had to turn my settings to low on my 7900xt as I was getting MAD crashing with a buddy of mine. I would join back in after crashing and as the pod was about to hit the ground, I would crash again, joined again and then crashed again...rinse and repeat.
Devs advised 7*** series GPU users to turn down the settings a lot and it's been working so far. Really lame. But yes, this game is kick ass.
 
Only thing keeping me from playing the game more is the matchmaking issues.

Edit: Turns out rewards aren't being given out today along with login and multiplayer issues....

They need to go all hands on deck and fix the problems today or I see a lot of people walking away and the game dying.
 
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Verge said:
Unplayable on console. Crazy from a Sony product.
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Yeah I haven't been able to get in for the last 2 hours.

They announced 'live maintenance' is taking place right now. Kinda odd every streamer I follow has zero connection issues, though.
 
RanceJustice said:
i just don't see this guy's arguments for the monetization as being accurate. I don't think he's being dishonest but maybe doesn't understand the mechanics of how its implemented?
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WAB has some really bad takes sometimes. I used to watch him pretty frequently, but it seems like over time he's gotten worse and worse. Unsubbed quite some time ago.
 
In fairness, I've only watched maybe 3-4 of WAB's vids but his take on Starfield being a series of boxes connected by loading screens was bang on, IMO. Biggest problems with that review was that he hadn't put that many hours into the game, and also the video length was too short to adequately cover the game's positive traits and many shortcomings. 21Kiloton did a masterclass job of that in his review, particularly Part 2.

Good to hear this is better than I initially anticipated and that it's not strictly P2W!
 
I don't have much to add, but will say the 4 hours I've been able to put into it were a lot of fun, I'm definitely returning to the game when I get the chance. Played co-op with a buddy, and calling in orbital strikes is amazing, and every weapon I've used so far feels satisfying (notably the pistol - the viability of a pistol sometimes determines my enjoyment of a game for some reason, and this one is pretty good). Another praise is this game actually has a decent sense of humor, even a few generic Helldiver VO lines have gotten a good chuckle from me.

Can echo the matchmaking problems - when (on console) in a party, was not able to join in to at least 5 different party join attempts. Aside from that, and some aliens not making full sense yet, I think this is scratching the itch me and my buddies were hoping to have scratched when Back 4 Blood came out.
 
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