I Want To Know Less About What's Changing In Helldivers 2

When it comes to live-service games like Helldivers 2, patch notes are a big deal. I know this, as does anybody who’s ever gotten stuck into one over the years.

It comes with the territory – since these games are constantly adding new content, new enemies, and new weapons, developers also have to constantly be keeping things in balance and ensuring that things are not only fair, but fun. A lot of times, being accountable to a player base means being transparent about what’s being added, removed, and changed. For better and for worse.

Of course, how much fun a player has isn’t actually dependent on how much they know about the nitty gritty of these tweaks. Mostly, players want to know because the culture of live-service games has grown over time to include an obsession with the ‘meta’. Players want to tweak their builds for maximum damage output, maximum mobility, or maximum defense, depending on their playstyles. In my opinion, min-maxing every little thing about my build isn’t fun at all, and Helldivers 2 in particular is best played without all of that in mind.

Some patches to the game have been controversial, and there was recently a burst of backlash against the developers because of the way those changes were communicated to the player base.

I say this because Helldivers 2 intentionally obscures a lot of statistics from players, and the developers leave a lot of things out of the patch notes. To be perfectly transparent, I don’t even read the patch notes, because those things don’t concern me. I don’t care that there are over 40 hidden stats for weapons, because being able to see every minute change to a weapon’s effectiveness isn’t going to make me like or dislike a gun more. All I need to know is if it’s going to work against the enemies I’ll be up against.

While I think there could be a few more details given to players regarding enemies and weapons, I don’t care all that much about what's being buffed or nerfed beyond having an indication of what new weapons I should try out in my next dive. I like that my favourite weapon might stop making me feel like a bug-squashing god out of the blue. It encourages me to expand my horizons and try out different tactics.

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I don’t want to know what environmental effects or enemies are being added, either. This isn’t a hot take, as far as I can tell, because the reason people love Helldivers 2 is that it surprises us constantly. The fact that Arrowhead doesn’t tell us when we’ll see new enemies or get access to new mechanics means that we get to discover it for ourselves.

Nobody knew exactly when we would get mechs until it was time to fight for them, leading to an incredibly united push from the community. And nobody was expecting flying bugs, but people started spotting them in the wild and the news spread like wildfire. Now there are rumours of invisible enemies that might be the Illuminate from the first Helldivers, which might very well be the case, considering that Arrowhead loves throwing curveballs at us. Not giving us information allows the developers to build mythology within the game, leaving player imaginations running wild.

That’s the fun of Helldivers 2 – I never know what I’m going to get. It keeps me diving in (ha) over and over again, because there’s a chance that this time I’ll be the one to get sniped by an invisible alien. Maybe it’ll be my party that gets massacred by something we didn’t even know existed. In a game so heavily dependent on the power of a delightful surprise, I have absolutely no interest in being told what’s going to be changing – I want to find out for myself.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.