The Helldivers 2 team has made recent comments suggesting that it is investigating ways to upgrade the difficulty for players without sacrificing game performance. A common complaint among some of the game’s critics is that the skill ceiling for the game is too low to allow meaningful skill expression between good and bad players at the highest levels. Players who can already regularly clear the highest levels of difficulty the game offers report a lack of challenge that can make the otherwise exciting gameplay boring over time. Hopefully, these latest comments point towards an intelligent way of creating more meaningful challenges for the game’s skilled players in the future.
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Responding to fans in the official Helldivers Discord general chat, developer Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Shams Jorjani expressed that the development team had been struggling with the right way to increase the game’s difficulty. After a user asked Jorjani what plans there were for expanding the skill ceiling in D10 difficulty, the Arrowhead CEO cautioned that such changes had to be done right to maintain game stability.
“I don’t know. We might find other ways to tackle difficulty beyond just higher difficulty,” wrote Jorjani. “More enemies equals more difficult. But more enemies [also] equals rougher performance. So we want to find other ways to push difficulty. Some love d10. Most play at lower difficulty.”
Since its launch last year, performance issues have been a persistent problem for some players, including those with relatively high-end PCs. In Discord messages from July 23rd, Jorjani apologized to players for the bugs, crashes, and performance issues, acknowledging the development team still had work to do on that front.
“We should have left things in a better state with the last update,” wrote Jorjani. “Most people are back on the 4th (office closure ends) and we’ll be focusing 100% on bug fixing and optimization. Sorry for the inconvenience. We know the game isn’t in tip-top shape right now.”
With Helldivers 2 currently not optimized and running at its full capacity, Jorjani seems to imply in the message that more fundamental issues need to be addressed before they can make plans for higher difficulties. Players regularly experience FPS drops from features like the fog, which makes the game more atmospheric but can cause slowdown issues. Some players feel that the FPS trade-off for fog is not worth it, especially since it seems to disadvantage players unfairly compared to the game’s enemies.
Jorjani explained in Discord that each new design addition has to be carefully considered, otherwise it could tank the experience for the rest of the player base that might not care as much about the new feature.
“For every release we try to improve quality stability and performance,” said Jorjani. “Sometimes we fall short of the mark. Every time we add more new stuff performance is taxed further.”
Although Helldivers 2 is immensely popular, some players forget that the development team working on the game is still relatively small, considering its level of success. According to the game’s sole materials artist Romain Lemaire, who spoke at the Game Developers Conference in March, there were initially only 20 people working on Helldivers 2 when production began, and the team has since grown to around 130 strong.
Let’s hope that the Helldivers 2 team can find a way to balance performance with the needs of high-end players who desire a greater challenge and their other players who enjoy the low barrier to entry and aren’t constantly pushing the highest difficulty they can.
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