SHOUT OUT - Helldivers 2 has just the right cadence of new content to retain its thoroughly engaged community
That’s a mighty fine cup of LiberTea.
By Jonathan Garrett
04/04/24
NOTE: thatHITBOX Shout Out’s are not sponsored content. They’re games, developers, individuals, or issues that we want to highlight and share purely out of interest.
You don’t need sweeping balance changes or an entirely new gameplay loop to make a live service game sing. We’ve seen time and again publishers of varying sizes try to chase the promise of Fortnite and other similarly expansive and complex titles in an attempt to siphon off a piece of the pie. Yet here we are, almost two months in to Helldivers 2, and there isn’t a more unintentionally comedic or thoroughly engaging ongoing game on the market right now.
The key to its success is undoubtedly developer Arrowhead’s warts and all approach to community interaction, and allowing said fanbase to organically uncover the drip feed of new strategems and enemy types as the narrative expands. The now infamous “Joel”, a gamemaster of sorts responsible for shaping the ongoing shared conflict, has drummed up more hype and discourse than most other significantly bigger budget shared world or live service titles have managed to muster.
Given the fight for “Super Earth” and ones desire to secure the sanctity of “Managed Democracy”, the tongue in cheek tone has also struck a positive note with fans, which has encouraged all kinds of hilarious role play videos and streams. This in turn has ironically done more to advertise how brilliant the actual core experience is than any Sony marketing budget would have likely achieved. Hats off to Arrowhead for making a truly special sequel.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
