Triumph In Blog

What is the actual appeal of Helldivers 2?

I think I’ve mentioned Helldivers in passing on this blog, but recent signs indicate that I may need to take a more significant look at it. I recently hit the 500 hour mark in the midst of their newest update cycle, which sends us players to “Cyberstan” (the mythical cyborg planet,) to face off with some old adversaries from the first game once again. This update has been enormous, its size leading to an influx in players both new and returning who all want to see the new toys and fight the new monsters. I could probably go on for a while about the specific mechanical functions of all the new “content,” and whine about my distaste for some of the balancing decisions, or how bad all my random teammates are. But the problems seem to go a little deeper than “the new extra hard stuff is too extra hard.”

This large update has brought with it the unintended–expected, though–consequence of spiking the internet discourse levels around the game. It’s been popular since it launched, but you don’t always see this game talked about so much that the social media algorithms start accidentally showing you posts from the fans when you’re not looking for them. And what posts are we getting, what are the fans saying? What insights into the game’s design are we learning from Arrowhead’s recent approach to patching and updating? What do we think about their direction for the game, and their intentions?

NOTHING!!! Of course the answer is nothing. There has been virtually no discussion about the game’s design or direction worth taking part in since its inception. I am always crusading against the Youtube pseuds, the “CommissarKais” or the “OhDoughs” of the world, but at least they appear to be playing the game, even if they only ever seem to adjudicate the game based on how “fun” the “meta” is. The recent discussion has melted my whole fucking brain: if it’s not stuffy, thoughtless posers still whining about how we don’t get “the point” of the game’s satire, it’s repugnant, smirking discord adults posting horrendous “erm nice point buddy *hellbombs u*” meme garbage to pile on the great data landfill of social media. There’s nothing more to get out of my system about the cynical, worthless latter, but what of the former? That sounds like a good starting point to me to actually discuss the game, because the gameplay and the story don’t always line up as well as we might hope…

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Helldivers 2 has a little bit of a contradiction at its center. It would seem that the premise and the actual gameplay design are at odds, in a sense. In a live-service multiplayer game, you will have to be very reactive and open to suggestion as a designer not just for marketing purposes (i.e. “how do we attract new players with DLC?”) but for the sake of the world you are creating. To start with rigid ideas of what the game “should be” and how players “should play” it is to deny the possibility that the game itself is interactive. If millions of people play the game and the game itself is very complicated, it is, perhaps unfortunately, a statistical inevitability that some of these players will experiment with the systems in ways unaccounted for during development, even going so far as to uncover bugs or exploits that provide “impossible” situations. The only way to maintain those rigid ideas of yours with any purity is to treat the players as if they are not participants in the game: scrub out every new behavior they manifest, plug all the holes they discover, and modify any and all systems or features that the players report using against your wishes.

This behavior is more than a good way to drive all your players away, from a management perspective. It’s also just an enormous waste of time. Why would a large team of people sink so much time and money into rendering and maintaining all these systems just to put the players in a dunce cap and sit them in the corner for learning those systems? There can no discrete “yes” or “no” from the start as to what your players are or are not allowed to experiment with. You are creating a world as a designer, and much like the real world your creation will evolve, expand, and change with time. New inputs equal new outputs, whether you anticipate them or not; if from nobody else, this is what I have learned from Straub-Huillet about art, no matter the scale. The Korean Backdash, the Quickscope, the Backwards Long Jump, the Reload Cancel, and, indeed, the “explosives meta.” Regardless of their motivations, players will develop things you do not account for, and it is now your responsibility, if you want the “live-service” to be truly “live,” react accordingly. How do new gameplay innovations actually affect the game’s intent, and why?

This is where Helldivers 2 finds its contradictions. The original intent of the game was to provide a satirical commentary on American jingoism using the familiar façade of Starship Troopers, as imagined by Paul Verhoeven in the 90s. The players are meaningless cogs in an enormous war machine that feels nothing for their deaths, lying to the populace it controls to keep them docile and ever expanding into intergalactic colonies. On paper, the basic gameplay model serves this “grunt fantasy” sensation, and we are helpless in a chaotic warzone of insurmountable enemy hordes and explosives. Players are prone to dying very quickly and being difficult to control in a touchy physics system with mostly unresponsive aiming and movement. For what is meant as a 3rd-person shooting game, the shooting is often far less useful than the use of “strategems,” where the player uses a 4-direction input system to send codes to a spaceship that possesses the real firepower necessary to face their foes. In fact, killing your foes is utitmately futile when they are liable to be instantly replaced 10 fold in a horrible hydra of man-eating insects, killer robots, or alien supersoldiers; the goal of each individual sortie is to complete a strategic objective and then extract at a fixed evacuation point, quantity of enemies slain notwithstanding. Extraction is not necessary, as the players may all die after completing an objective and be labelled as sacrificial heroes by the game, then awarded their points and currencies regardless.

Wait–points and currencies? Indeed, Helldivers has always allowed players to grow and expand their own arsenals by levelling up in an experience system and collecting materials during missions to spend on new weapons, armor, strategems, cosmetics, or miscellaneous gameplay upgrades pertaining to their personal ship (to which they return between sorties). These upgrades allow them to take on progressively harder missions along the game’s robust difficulty curve, eventually hitting a point of familiarity allowing them to stare down tank-armored juggernauts with complete confidence. Some cracks in the original premise are beginning to show. It is already unoriginal and a little dishonest to begin by ostensibly copying Starship Troopers. To do so while also maintaining a certain level of longevity and progression for the player, subsisting on the idea that they are personally important, well-equipped, and powerful commensurate with their willingness to pay for microtransactions? At best, some internal teams at Arrowhead may not be on speaking terms with each other, and maybe there are some repository pushes with hurtful words in the descriptions. At worst, the game may just be lacking direction, and stuck in a death-drive of “content releases” that are cursed to eat its impressive construction away.

To re-orient myself a bit, I will say that I obviously do love the game. At 500 hours and counting, I personally think it has a lot of appeal and a lot of detail. I have described it as an ostensible “copy,” but that’s a bit reductive. In actuality, since the first installment a decade ago, the game has done a great job of developing its sense of style into something very unique and, for lack of a better word, “cool.” But Helldivers being “cool” might be a good indicator of its inevitable doom, when you consider the reactive mindset I described earlier. Arrowhead has realistically done a stupendous job of communicating with the community and listening to feedback during the game’s lifespan, regularly averting fanbase crises that have completely killed other games in the past. Weirdly though, it feels self-defeating: the players are given a war to fight, they get good at fighting it, and the creators of the war respond by giving the players new tools to continue the war, which they are obviously orchestrating. If we are prolonging the game’s lifespan by devoting resources to making our players feel crafty and capable, where exactly does the satire kick in?

In order to avoid the rigidity I have described, Arrowhead has written themselves into a corner. By pleasing the community and making players feel powerful, they inevitably feed the fascist impulse toward genocide fantasy that their game was conceived as opposition to. The in-game updates often include new stories and new pieces of lore that indict the Helldivers as knowing participants in meaningless violence that can never succeed in its strategic goals. And yet, those same updates also include incredibly powerful new weaponry that is always upping the ante on the player’s ability to trivialize all their threats. We often complete our strategic goals! If we didn’t, we would never unlock all the things Arrowhead broke their backs implementing, so what would be the point of keeping the servers up? The game keeps giving us new challenges to face and new tools to face them, so of course we want to interact with the experience systems, try the new features, and see the outcomes of the in-game wars we are directed to fight through the “major order” narratives every update cycle. From the player’s perspective, the game is the progression, so should they simply stop playing in order to be morally conscious of the story?

If I didn’t know better, I would say Arrowhead accidentally made Helldivers 2 a thrilling, thoughtful multiplayer experience when they want to make something that is crushing, unfair, and didactic. Of course, I DO know better, because after 500 hours I can confidently say that a certain level of knowhow can have anyone crushing max-difficulty firefights with relative ease, especially with 3 other experienced teammates. This does not come about by accident! It is undeniable that the goal of the Helldivers gameplay model is to create a certain atmosphere in which a unique, desperate form of teamwork can be built with complete strangers, and finding a certain satisfaction in overcoming adversity. There are no scaling variables for difficulty and no level restrictions on matchmaking, nor are there any competitive elements to the game. You are sent to a hostile world, usually some kind of desolate, rocky wasteland, and tasked to use the tools at your disposal (without much tutorial) to perform given tasks spread out over a map area. The area also consists of many cruel, confusing landmarks: crashed ships, destroyed human outposts, vacant colonial cities, or strongholds of enemy soldiers unrelated to the primary task at hand.

Helldivers 2 is like no other game in the way it crafts the atmosphere of these places. Even with the big, bombastic music and the occasional encounters with protracted battle over large areas, the player is always able and often encouraged to disengage from combat and take in the bizarre landscape around them. This is done both for strategic purposes–refresh cooldowns on strategems and find new routes for flanks–and for emotional purposes–come face to face with an alien environment and see what it is that both you and your opponents have destroyed in the course of combat. “Meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture, and kill them.” The player is conscious of all aspects of the battlefield, and given plenty of time in each mission to think about the position they are in. Unlike horde shooters such as Earth Defense Force, the enemies and weapons are far less varied but the environments are given far more detail to take in at will. The player becomes more of a real soldier than they might believe, but unlike a realistic simulator game à la Arma, they are given inescapable direction in the form of time limits and objectives, not to mention faced with images of incredible space-age technology and futurism.

So what are we left with? We immerse ourselves in a state of complete chaos and are rewarded for prevailing through, and yet outside of our missions we are admonished for our complicity in warmongering by, as far as we know, the same world that rewarded us. Something like, say, Fallout may provide us the American fantasy of violence, then create theoretical consequences for it that teach us about our own propensity toward it. Or, something like Earthbound may provide us with the irony of an absurd American culture that insists on values and morals, but refuses to take responsibility for the future its warmongering has created. 30 years later, a game like Helldivers 2 seems to provide us that same fantasy and that same irony, but then go on sustaining it indefinitely, but insisting that they feel guilty over it. Here is a new explosive tool that kills everything deader more gooder than ever before, and you should pay money to have fun with it. But not too much fun!

I have brought up Paul Verhoeven already, and I believe that Arrowhead may have actually adopted his entire ideology, rather than simply his interpretation of alien bugs. Verhoeven is a man who is famous for his in-your-face, exuberant satire, suckering in American audiences with sexuality and violence that they crave only to undermine it by portraying its fascist participants as vile and stupid. However, he is ironically also famous among the fascist he espouses to be making fun of, because his style emphasizes that the satirical images be just as faithfully expensive, detailed, and unique as any of the less thoughtful Hollywood equivalents. Starship Troopers itself contains far more cumbersome a plot for its cast of disposable white soldiers than one might expect given its ambitions to portray them as cogs in a war machine, almost as if Verhoeven feels sorry for them. In his satires of the American dream, like Showgirls or Spetters, he still cannot suppress his desire to linger on sexually exploitative imagery, often neurotically choreographed as if by someone who cares primarily for the construction of the images themselves. Benedetta, of course, is plagued by constant, undiluted fetishism, visualizing the exploited lesbians at the center almost exclusively as vulnerable sex objects in detail far exceeding the desire to make a “point.”

The Occam’s Razor for his filmmaking style is that he simply likes the sex and violence as much as everybody else, and presents it as satire in an impotent bid for self-awareness. This is why he is popular among Americans, yes, but really everyone in the first world: he is aware that he is privileged and perverse, but oh, he feels bad about it. What more can he do? We are allowed to enjoy our dumb fun so long as we flagellate ourselves for doing so. We can all have our cake and eat it too so long as we have a fictionalized, externalized America to be our sin-eater, whether we are American or not (Frantz Fanon: we didn’t listen!) The directors of Arrowhead seem to be interested in this cake-havery as well, creating a slick, exciting sci-fi action game that’s fun and energizing to play with your friends, but also maintaining plausible deniability against fascism accusations by claiming to have an in-universe reason as to why the fun is wrong and will be cosmically rectified by the game’s narrative. All this through the same channels by which the developers gleefully report that they have licensed material from their personal favorite sci-fi genocide simulators to use as crossover DLC.

The elephant in the room: I enjoy the game in spite of this hypocrisy. Does this make me a hypocrite? Does this make all of the players hypocrites? In truth, it’s difficult to say. I begun this critique by describing a potential attitude of game design; a design team that works against player interests. Arrowhead has at times done just the opposite, but in more recent times has begun to generate some friction with their new materials and seeming lack of interest in fixing some of the game’s technical failures. If the former situation was Arrowhead damning themselves to dishonesty and imperialistic, cognitive dissonance (just like the work of Paul Verhoeven,) is the latter situation a way to reverse their fortune? It is a cruel suggestion, considering that to do so–to alienate your players and discourage creativity and interactivity with your systems–is both a death knell for your live-service game’s future and a retroactive admission of wrongdoing. Who wants to spend months implementing something, only to delete it a week after launch because the users couldn’t behave with it?

We see this frequently with the live-service model. TEKKEN 8, the newest installment of the legendary 3D-fighting game franchise TEKKEN, has been under fire since its launch for implementing broken, confusing systems that the players despise, yet seeming too proud (or embarrassed) to do away with them. The result is that their playerbase has evaporated, and their status as arguably the second-largest fighting game community in the world has been shaken irreversibly in the wake of mass exodus from their first-party-organized tournaments. Overwatch, as we are all likely aware, finds themselves embroiled in a similar push-pull relationship to their playerbase practically every year, seeing only diminishing returns and increasingly desperate marketing as time has worn on. One wonders if it would behoove Arrowhead to learn from the many mistakes of other live-service games and simply double down on their decisions, striking what they don’t like and keeping what they do, with or without player approval.

This is especially interesting to consider in Helldivers 2’s current, tenuous state. The most recent update sent players to “Cyberstan,” resurrecting some locations and factions from the first game as brand new avenues for horrific, asymmetrical warfare. The players have largely been happy with all the new material, especially considering Arrowhead has conveniently ignored a known exploit for circumventing the need to pay real money for “premium content” (another manifestation of the developers’ guilt complex, for better or for worse). And yet, it is the game’s state of balance and optimization that has the international community deeply frustrated, taking to social media to rabidly argue over this, that, and the other with themselves and even with the developers. A surge in new, heavily-armored enemies makes missions feel not harder but more tedious, and a buggy new environment leaves us gambling with the efficiency of the admittedly very well-implemented and unique new weaponry. We continue to play the game for now, but we in the community are disgruntled a bit by the barriers between our understanding of the game’s systems up to now and the seeming displeasure that the designers intend for us in these new situations. The game is not financially in distress at present, but it would seem that a critical point for the game’s future is approaching. How will they continue to design the game moving forward?

There is no single right answer to their conundrum. Arrowhead may continue to kowtow to our immediate desires, putting more Halo guys in the game and backing off the difficulty to make us feel more like heroes; admittedly, even the frustrating new missions are only slightly harder than the existing ones. I, with my max-level brethren, have been making short work of our formidable new opponents. This will keep the game “fun,” and hopefully more of the existing systems like weapon attachments or armor customization will be expanded with that in mind, but the cognitive dissonance will then continue. The narrative component of Helldivers 2 will remain confusing, dishonest, and, to an extent, annoying, symptomatic of the same careless privilege that sustains such expensive, frivolous endeavors as live-service video games in the first place. This confusion will only power the existing hostage situation that the players have the designers in, hatebombing the game at the slightest provocation until a compromise is made that seems to displease the writers. Of course, Arrowhead could also pursue this new avenue that has led their community to complain, increasing the difficulty of the game by making their enemies truly innumerable and insurmountable, forcing their players to abandon tactics they thought they knew and accept regular mission failures. To do this, they would have to be knowingly signing their own death warrant, refusing to remove what the players dislike just as so many peers have done, closing their eyes and smiling serenely as the ship rapidly sinks beneath them. It would certainly be more in-line with their original stated ambitions!

I believe that there is a better answer for Arrowhead, however. One that may avoid a lethal injection of vitriol from their players, but may also free them from their ideological dysfunction and allow their game to feel consistent, funny, and prescient in the way they want. There is definitely an existing precedent for anarchic, fatalistic sci-fi in the West that acknowledges its underlying desire for bloodshed, using the intensity of its violence and the hypocrisy of its concept as a cudgel to swing back at bourgeois puritanism. Warhammer: 40,000, Judge Dredd, Syndicate Wars, Fallout, Shadowrun, even the original Starship Troopers: the list goes on! Even older things with slightly conservative undertones–William Gibson, David Cronenberg, Troma movies, etc.–still find great success in undermining fascist ideas of moral purity and etiquette through sheer force of gross. It is decidedly juvenile and silly, and perhaps less lofty or intellectual than pretending that your game is secretly “saying something” that only some people are smart enough to notice. But it’s also a hell of a lot more honest, and a hell of a lot less smug. Doesn’t that feel more mature, from an artist’s perspective?

Or, indeed from a designer’s perspective. The game’s existing framework already supports a terrifying, enormous, and very special experience of inconceivable, total warfare, so it would only be a trick of the writing team to find a way to stealthily admit what they have consistently proven: being a spaceman who shoots chainsaw robots with a big gun is offensive, but enjoyable. We have already established that the players’ faction is an evil empire that shoots these robots in order to plunder their homes and maintain a constant enemy, but is it not so that there are rival empires that expand aggressively in the same manner? Some throwaway copy from both the first game and the current one exist to imply that all of Super Earth’s opponents were once peaceful, but are now warlike as a result of having conflict forced on them. Perhaps just abandon that idea wholesale, see how the playerbase feels, perhaps explore the other factions motivations and lives more fully in a separate game or something? That is how Warhammer built its empire, after all, and we learn no less about our own desires for apocalypse and war from our interest in that.

The central critique of the game’s narrative simply fails when held up to the gameplay model, and there is no way to convince players that their tight, coordinated teamwork against impossible odds is actually wrong when it pays off. Unless you just aggravate them into not playing the game anymore, which is, at risk of speaking with absolute certainty, bad game design. Arrowhead would be a lot better off maintaining the good relationships and solid core game they have, continuing to wow the whole world with the new warbonds and planets, but easing off on exporting their self-pity onto the players. When a player is given the story, considers how much they like the gameplay in spite of its implications, and then decides that they simply don’t care about the story and would rather keep shooting stuff, there are two ways to interpret their behavior. You can assume that they are a dumb drone who cannot appreciate what you are attempting to construe, or you could face the fact that you built that gameplay for them, so you may have more in common with them than you may think!

Perhaps it is crass, and really just lazer tag with extra steps. Get a room full of people around and put guns in their hands, then watch them light up. You could make a thorough critique of how Helldivers 2 is received so well because of how prepared audiences are to truly immerse themselves in warfare, and it seems, coincidentally, that the creators of Helldivers 2 have been trying to make that critique for some time. You cannot develop that critique while also spending your entire day touching up the particle effects for your digital gas attack war crimes. It certainly doesn’t help that much of the marketing and community outreach for the game centers around ironic references to the Vietnam War–a real-life genocide that left over a million Vietnamese dead–for sick kicks on social media. Helldivers 2 really does have a contradiction at its center: a game about the brutal, inescapable reality of war and imperialism, two things that apparently kick ass!