Yet Another Look at the Helldivers Fiasco

I guess I’ll chime in on the whole Helldivers fiasco. For the uninitiated, Helldivers 2 is a game that’s currently on Steam and is the sequel to the lesser known Helldivers. Helldivers I feel like was a modest success. It was a top down shooter, where you played a Helldiver, a soldier of fortune clearing out bugs in the name of democracy. I played it a few times with my friends and had a blast. It had some really core mechanics that make the game work, including the button pressing minigame and the copious amounts of friendly fire. In fact, because it was a top down game, friendly fire was even more prevalent because players needed to go prone much more often, since changing firing elevation wasn’t really a thing.

So the change in the game was from taking all those core mechanics and making it a third person shooter. It turned out in this case to be the magic bullet that brought it all together, since the gameplay, story, and art were pretty much untouched from the first game. I even hazard to say that the tech was mostly unchanged, and that they mostly just moved the camera to the new control scheme. For whatever reason, the game was a runaway success, and I got to sound like a hipster and say that I played the first one. (Kidding obviously, no one cares that I played the first one.)

It was such an unexpected success that the servers totally shit the bed that first weekend. It was bad. I remember it being so bad that I glibly made a post on my Facebook page that people should play Balatro while waiting for the servers to let people in. It was so bad and compounded by various issues. People couldn’t get in, the error message was cryptic, and when people could get in, they’d idle so that they could stay in, making it harder for more people to get in. On top of that, realizing that people were losing out on XP, the company decided to do a double XP weekend, which only had the effect of having more people trying to get on and flooding the servers even more. Evidently it was something with the PSN network (yes, the N stands for network as well, come back to me when they stop calling it the Sahara Desert or the La Brea Tar Pits). Whatever the case, it was eventually resolved and many, many aspiring Helldivers got to experience the joy of Managed Democracy and Super Earth (cringing at the number of people who will miss the satire, but that’s a topic for another day).?

And man, it has been a whirlwind of a time. The game is engaging and underneath all the silliness of the setting, it is an extremely solid shooter, with all sorts of minutiae that is taken into account, whether the player realizes it or not. Whereas a game like Valorant has minimal randomness and everything is mostly deterministic (minus a few things like grenades), this game is all about the randomness and chaos of war. The sheer number of times I’ve done something and regretted it moments later numbers at least in the low 100s.

Anyhow, last week, there was an announcement that PSN integration was going to be forced onto the players of Helldivers, despite the fact that the game has been running amazingly successfully for the past few months without it.

The response, as one would expect, was incredibly immediate and angry.?

I can only surmise that someone at Playstation was upset that they missed out on all that juicy user data, presumably because the integration failed during the release. So then the decision to retroactively require an extra hoop to jump through despite the game running just fine as it was made. The decision probably didn’t even take into account the number of users that would be lost because of the lack of PSN support in certain regions. Or if it was considered, it was “an acceptable number.”

The thing is, with many games, once you’ve launched, you can’t have a do-over and hope to succeed. You’ve already let the horse out of the gate, all the energy and hype have gone with it. Especially if you realize your horse is a golden goose that’s laying golden eggs. All right, this analogy has gone off the rails. Even liveops games/GaaS, which is so much the trend these days, can’t expect to make the entry flow more involved and not receive pushback. Sure, change stuff IN the game all you want, but don’t mess with the start up more than you have to. The only time it’s well received is when the flow simplifies and requirements are taken off, like when a game sunsets and no longer needs server support (an impassioned plea for more support for abandonware, please!)

Anyhow, this weekend turned into a massive mess, as one of the best games to come out this year got review bombed so hard that it went from Positive to well, see for yourself.?

It’s only at the end, when Sony decided to backtrack on their decision that the reviews started coming back as positive, but even now, it’s still sitting at a Mixed rating. Whoops.

To drive the point even more, the number of total reviews that were negative were numbering in the 200,000 range, when over the course of the lifetime of the game, the reviews barely hit over 50,000 for a given day. That’s how pissed people were.

And unsurprisingly, people asked for refunds. That hurts because Arrowhead, the developers were definitely seen as the scapegoats for a decision that wasn’t in their hands at all.

It’s easy to say that it was a boneheaded move on Sony’s part, and that they shouldn’t have done it in the first place. But I honestly can’t say what the management style is like there, and what motivation people had to approve these things. Maybe someone had a bonus that was on the line, they needed X number of PSN accounts by a certain date. Maybe someone genuinely thought it was a good idea and not an imposition at all. I can’t say.

But I do know that making a game and launching a game are extremely tenuous endeavors. Making a successful game, doubly so. Game devs are creating entire worlds, where nothing is easy or free. So when a game comes out the gate as a roaring success, LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE. At least for a while. And to be fair, PS did do that, at least for 3 months.?

To be fair, PSN support isn’t the worst thing in the world, it’s mostly a failure of messaging and a failure of rolling out. I actually think that adding PSN could have been successful if it was opt-in and that there were proper incentives given. Look at something like Rocket League, which has support on Steam and Epic. I’ve had friends move over to Epic after buying the game on Steam because of Epic exclusive cosmetics. Not exclusive access, which I feel are pretty counterproductive to player counts, but simply exclusive cosmetics.?

Applying this to Helldivers, players have demonstrated that they’ll jump through hoops if they are incentivized enough, but PSN doesn’t seem like a value add in any way except for PS. Players are savvy enough to kick that to the curb. If I were to handle this, I’d probably create an exclusive warbond for PSN accounts with some cool stuff in it. People are already opting into which war bonds they want from the outset, since the very first war bond is included in the deluxe version of the game. Maybe some ways to celebrate the addition of PSN to the game. Exclusive capes or titles or the such. When Team Fortress 2 added Mac support to the game, they added Mac earbuds to the game and people FLOCKED to log in on a Mac because that was the way to get them. Would it have the adoption that the people at PS wanted? Probably not. Would it be smoother than the unmitigated disaster that this weekend was? Definitely.

Use more carrots, people, and less sticks. In a world where there are a million options for entertainment, sticks will do exactly what you expect with the player base, it’ll punish them and they’ll leave for a game that respects their time and energy.

And from a design point of view, it’s an interesting creative challenge to incentivize the player to do something in the meta game, along with all the other incentives that exist.

For additional reading for interesting ways that designers handled meta issues in the game, read about the way Blizzard handled the “Stone of Jordan” issues in Diablo 2. Really just an interesting problem and solution all the way around.