I really, really want to like that side of the game. I love the idea of players pooling together their tiny, individual actions towards a greater shared goal and what it can bring in terms of RP and immersion. Having new content gated behind community participation is an awesome idea, and I totally get the idea of simulating a back and forth war between the players and the AI for the control of the Galaxy.
However, I can’t help but feel mostly frustrated with how it’s actually implemented, both in its presentation and in its actual mechanics.
On the presentation side, everything looks so half-hearted that it ends up feeling meaningless. Apart from the major order and a few flavor lines thrown together in a corner of the screen, there’s nothing that make us feel like the galactic war has any consequence on the lore of the game. Every few days we gain or lose a planet, but it doesn’t really feel like winning or losing: we just get our medals or we don’t, and then it’s mostly back to usual business. Even the consequences are not clearly shown: the apparition of bit gunship is a clear consequence of us not managing to capture To it, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the player base won’t even notice it and just think “well, I guess the update brought us some new enemy types, cool!”. I get minimalism, but I feel all of this would be so much better if we had small cutscenes to mark each important step, or even just a war room in the ship where we could read strategic reports or whatever, anything to give it more context.
On the gameplay side, the fact that the only available action the players can do to have an influence of the global war is to either launch “attack missions” on enemy planets or “defense missions” on a super earth planet feels very limited, especially since all missions are played very similarly. It just seems to devolve in a endless tug-of-war consisting of capturing a planet, then defending it over and over, with very few variations and very few reasons to care Gameplay-wise. How cool would it be if defense missions were actually about defending allied areas against an enemy invasion, with radically different objectives like supporting SEAF positions or defending strategic zones against waves of enemies?
To close up what is slowly starting to look like a wall of text, I just want to say that I don’t mean to sound whiny and that I actually really enjoy the game as it is. It just feels like a wasted opportunity to have this truly awesome idea and then do almost nothing with it.
What are your thoughts on this?
Edit: Also, just wanted to point out I realize that budgets exist and the galactic war probably wasn’t (and shouldn’t have been) their top priority. Getting the core gameplay was and still is more important than the rest.
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As someone who spent some time in the US Military, most of your efforts will always feel like they were completely pointless. This is actually very realistic.
Yeah, that part I feel is a very intentional design choice by the devs. Going through the worst hell of your life, barely making it out alive, clawing your way to survival, only to find out that you contributed one thousandth of one percent toward the overall effort. It’s meant to be bleak.
On one hand this aspect of the game is probably the closest thing about it, but on the other I can see what you mean. The termicide towers were an interesting variation on the standard missions and had direct impact on the war and the lore. If I had to bet, the devs will be rolling more of this sort of thing out but it is not going to be every week. They are too small of a dev team to have that much output.
Wild guess here, but I’m betting a lot of the bigger content being added after launch has actually been ready to go for a long time now, and it’s being added bit by bit to follow the story.
I wasn’t around for the termicide towers event but from what I’ve heard this is more or less the kind of stuff I would like more of, yeah. It doesn’t even have to be unique for each event, but just a mission type with a real gameplay variation.
Every few days we gain or lose a planet, but it doesn’t really feel like winning or losing: we just get our medals or we don’t, and then it’s mostly back to usual business.
I feel like a lot of what you just wrote could pretty much be written to apply to people’s feelings about almost all modern wars. I’ve seen similar stuff by veterans who have been deployed to Afghanistan. It’s like, what the hell is the point in all of this? I always laugh after completing an epic mission that we barely passed and seeing the liberation percent go up something like 0.00000001%.
But yeah, I actually do enjoy the major orders and how they relate them to new content. Capturing planets to unlock exosuits was cool, and I feel like there will be more consequences to the termicide gas (or was that the Shriekers?).
Obviously having some cinematics would be awesome, but realistically I don’t think that’s doable with the number of major orders they have. Different mission types is cool, like what they did with the termicide, but again that’s a pretty big lift when they’re doing multiple major orders per week.
That’s fair, I’m aware my expectations are probably way too high for a game of this scale and budget
Your point is valid about it feeling meaningless, but that’s totally intentional. The helldivers are literally meat for the meat grinder, the war is 100% instigated and perpetuated by super earth for no reason other than to exploit the various planetary resources.
At it’s most basic, it is much like Deep Rock Galactic in that the core game is just a horde shooter with some interesting objectives and wrapped with some background world building.
That all being said, I absolutely would not object to more news broadcasts on the giant propaganda monitor in the ship, or like you said a war room or something where we could get more info on what’s going on.
…feeling meaningless…100% instigated…perpetuated by super earth… …sounds like treason to me.
The game itself offers nothing in terms of involving players in the galactic war. The major orders seem to come out of nowhere. So I’m not involved.
I’m not going on Discord to try and figure out how they convoluted something on there.
It is unfortunate, I hope they include more in the galaxy map and maybe use the TV screen that runs the ads for that. They might even be able to plug a few YouTubers as news anchors or something.
It’s kinda nice that it exists, but that’s about it. I think you need to watch dedicated youtube videos to really feel involved. Wometimes you log in and get 50 medals for completing a major order that i didn’t really participate and i just think: “okay, thanks i guess.” If you fail a major order it’s even less, because you wouldn’t know if there wasn’t a text that said the major order failed.
I don’t want to be argumentative I’m just curious what your expectation is in terms of the gaming showing feedback. AH have a dedicated GM deciding the direction of the game. The mech was released in response to winning a MO, gunships and AT-ATs was released in response to failing a MO. They just released a cape in response to the community memeing on the Creek. To me this is the best feedback to the players I’ve seen from devs in awhile.
I, apprehensively, hope it’s still just part of their growing pains. It boggles my mind to see sequels, time and again, leave behind good features and qualities that there were no reasons to drop. Load outs being a thing in HD1 but not 2 is frustrating. But I’m mainly referencing the galactic war. It was much less interactive on a granular level with no major orders or personal orders. But higher difficulties gave greater contribution to the war and you got a great sense of how your playtime actually affected the effort. Whether or not they are still tweaking numbers behind the scenes is debatable and they surely will never tell us since they love not telling us shit. But it really doesn’t feel like any particular time I play has any bearing on anything like it did in HD1. Best hope I can have is that we’ll get there eventually. Or maybe not and we just play this story out as they wrote it.
I think that’s also a problem endemic to this game being so much more popular and the major orders dictating a lot more than just moving around what planets you can fight on, like it was in 1.
They have to tightly control the flow of the war artificially to prevent us from washing over the map too quickly since they obviously have specific ideas of when they want us to get to new planets and they want to use certain planets to unlock certain things.
The numbers could be absurdly fudged just to ensure that we fail something for lore or roleplaying purposes, which is, I think, good.
The galactic war in the first was mile wide and inch deep, you just washed over the galaxy time after time and we won, basically, every single time, no surprises. It just didn’t matter. I’ll take the galactic war artificially mattering in a roleplay sense over it mechanically working predictably, but leading to severe repetition and the constant locking out of being able to fight certain races because everyone and their mom fought the terminids first.
