Following yet another post-update drubbing from the Helldivers 2 community, Arrowhead has announced it is making sweeping changes to numerous parts of its sci-fi shooter. Of these, one of the studio’s more interesting plans is overhauling the sense of progression in its live-service experience, both for individual players and the wider galactic war.
Arrowhead sketched out some of these ideas in a message to the community, but now the studio has published a more detailed article explaining its plans for the future of the galactic war. There’s a lot to dig into, but in short, there are big changes ahead for major orders, fighting on planets, and how players improve their ships.
Let’s start with the galactic war, where one of Arrowhead’s main objectives is to give players a better sense of the impact they have upon it. “It’s never been clear if the actions of the community lead to different outcomes, or if it’s just smoke and mirrors,” writes game director Mikael Erikson. “The reality is that the community impact on the Galactic War differs, but even in the cases where we did a lot of work to prepare for very different outcomes, we’ve struggled to communicate it in the game.”
As such, Arrowhead is launching what it calls “galactic war campaigns” later this month. Describing these as an “evolution” of the current major orders, these will be longer objectives that take place over one to three weeks. According to Erikson, the intention here is that “it will always be clear what the active Campaign is, how it’s going, what the outcomes have been, and what’s at stake.”
In addition, longer campaigns will come with better rewards that go beyond the usual dollop of medals that I always struggle to spend. Erikson says Arrowhead plans to experiment with these, but they’ll range from “gameplay altering effects to cool items”
That’s Arrowhead’s plan at the galactic scale. But once campaigns are in effect, changes will also be made at the planetary level, via the introduction of planet warfronts. These will reshuffle mission distribution along a dynamically changing frontline, letting you fight defensive missions in Super Earth-controlled territory, battle directly on the front line, or dive into enemy territory to embark upon dangerous behind-enemy-lines missions.
Arrowhead says it has always wanted to do this, but felt like there wasn’t enough mission variety to implement it until recently.. “The intention is to make it more fun to liberate planets with your squad and deepen the Galactic War and Community Progression systems. We want liberating planets to feel unique and epic for everyone,” Erikson explains.
Finally, there are changes coming at the player level too. Arrowhead is swapping out personal orders for a broader ‘personal campaign progression’ system so that you’re less likely to be at objective odds with your teammates. But arguably the bigger change is an overhaul to how Super Destroyers work.
For this, not only is Arrowhead altering the ship module system to provide a more personalised progression system, it’s also adding new types of ships entirely. The first ship is being worked on right now by Arrowhead’s newly formed ship team: “Our intention is that each new ship will have their own unique progression paths, specializations and customizations.”
Even this doesn’t represent everything. Other planned changes include raising the level cap to 300, better enemy and player traversal, improvements to the economy, and more. It all sounds promising to me, and I particularly look forward to hearing about a new objective and not having it completed by the time I drop in.
Read the full article here
