Arrowhead Game Studios has provided an update on its 60-day improvement plan for Helldivers 2 as it seeks to gain back goodwill from the community.
In a statement posted to Steam Thursday, the team highlighted the changes coming to the next update on September 17, which is just a small part of the plan to retool the game. However, the improvements are seeking to tackle a lot of the problems players have brought forth to the developers over the past few months.
The big criticism has been about the concept of “fun” — or rather, what the developers could do to make the game less difficult for difficulty’s sake rather than exciting for players. One of the changes coming in the next update will help to make enemies easier to deal with by decreasing armor on many enemy types, and tweaking balance by reducing rockets fired by the Gunship, for example. This will hopefully “make them feel more rewarding to kill when you use the proper tools to handle them but ensure they still feel formidable.”
In general, armor penetration, enemy armor and health, and anti-tank weapons will be reworked. Arrowhead noted in the statement that the team has already done an “initial balancing pass” over 30 weapons and stratagems so far, including the autocannon, heavy machine gun, and anti-material rifle. They’re also working on flamethrower weapon fixes, which will be welcome considering they were a huge point of contention for the player base.
This 60-day plan was created to address community concerns over certain balance changes that have been implemented since Helldivers 2‘s launch. This all came to a head with August’s Escalation of Freedom update, the game’s first major update, which introduced a bunch of unpopular balance tweaks, such as huge nerfs to incendiary weapons like flamethrowers. People also feel that Arrowhead makes patches that don’t align with players’ experiences.
Game director Mikael Eriksson admitted there were “some things we just didn’t get right — and other more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and game direction.” So the team has been working on better systems for gaining player feedback, and new closed beta tests for new features. In the Steam statement, Arrowhead noted that chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt is working with the design team to analyze player feedback and other data to identify problem points.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.