Hey guys, this is a reupload of a video I released last week, because the original had some audio mistakes. Will make sure to double check my visible audio tracks in the future lol.
I did a double-take at first. Some of those phrases are really familiar. Did I watch this video already? No, it just posted. Was this stolen from another creator? No, **phew** just a re-upload. All is well. Your analysis is just as good the second time around. :-)
The way you delivered the "And that's just business baby." and the "Here we see a bug running up to my buddy, my boy, I try to shoot the bug-" was my favorite part of the video. I enjoyed it all but that delivery was everything.
I guess I never really thought about how much context helps alleviate the frustration of death, and just how much the reinforcing pod makes death less painful than lying on the ground surrounded by enemies hoping your teammates can survive long enough and clear at the enemies to revive you.
So basically the previous game Arrowhead make to Helldivers (1) was Magicka. And the whole point of Magicka is that the wizards are pretty bad at their spellcasting, which in turns causes a whole lot of friendly kills, which is all good because wizards know how to cast revive so basically you can murder your friends just as much as you murder the enemies and as long as there's one person alive to revive everyone, no harm done. Helldivers 1 is pretty much the same game as Magicka, just with a shooting and space setting instead of magic and fantasy. (The stratagem system is exactly the same as the spell system in Magicka, only difference is that in Magicka each input is an "element" instead of a directional arrow, but it works exactly the same way) Funny thing: Magicka has a Vietnam War DLC where the wizards have machine guns and one of their spells is actually calling a napalm airstrike. That's pretty much exactly what Helldivers 1 became later.
That's a really great connection! I was a big fan of magicka back in the day, and I knew they were made by the same team, I'm a little embarrassed I didn't think of that friendly fire link myself!
A huge problem with video games is that losing is an expected outcome at some point, yet it's not really implemented as a feature. Games just teleport you to a safezone, or you have to reload. It's just a lazy way to do it and takes you out of the game. In one moment you're in an intense fight, or maybe you trigger a trap while exploring, totally immersed, and in the next you're forced into an out-of-game menu. It's like having a FPS game, but the guns wouldn't have any graphics or audio, you just look at someone, left-click, and they get despawned: that's the level on which dying/losing is implemented in most games. For example in Kingdom Come when you "die", instead of having to reload you could just wake up beaten up in the middle of nowhere, with all your stuff stolen by bandits, and you have to recover it. Maybe on easy difficult you can recover your stuff at the nearest church/monastery and just lose 10% of your money.
The game often presents propaganda that is summed up to dying in the name of liberty and the game design couldn't reinforce that more, this game is designed in such a way to make people feel like a patriotic warrior giving everything they have in the name of super earth even if it means dying
I tend to only get mad due to extremely lucky (unlucky?) One shots from the enemy. Other than that I tend to get upset that I get rag dolled or the enemy takes their time trying to kill me rather than quickly turning me into a hero who gave it their all. Hell most the time I'm not mad just blown away at how brutal the mandatory open casket service will look with an astonished "damn.... that looks painful to see"
There are two elements I Havate dying to. Mainly because counter play is hard. Chargers, where you need to dedicate one stradegem to anti-tank, and the big hunter like thinfs that can survive with their heads blown off. Also look creepy as hell
when i die or lose a mission in other games, it just felt like a complete waste of time and i'm very much a stickler for having a sense of progression. but in this game, if i know that i completed all the objectives, i don't feel nearly as frustrated if it still says 'mission success' at the end.
The whole idea is, you will die, many times. So when you don't die and get to bring those delicious purple samples back to the ship, it feels GOOD. I was supposed to die back there, but some how, i did not. I must be the greatest ever!!! Next mission you get trained by a giant walker and a couple tanks while a hulk pleasures himself while watching you die.
I'm kind of... of two minds about dying in this game. From a purely theoretical and conscious perspective, yeah, no big deal. It's part of the satire, it gives you the weaponized drop pod, etcetera. But from a more realistic perspective... it still sucks, at least for me. When I first started the game, I hated the feeling of dying so much that I nearly stopped playing it, because the drop pods always managed to put me directly into a spot that got me surrounded, body-blocked out of any escape, and killed. There were death-chains that were four deaths long where I never survived more than two to three seconds out of the pod, and yeah, that's really goddamn frustrating; the game's unforgiving nature really just makes it that much worse. I've certainly become more desensitized to it over time, and it doesn't bother me as much as it used to, but it still feels awful more often than not. However, I will note, it still feels less bad than it does in other games. I stopped playing DRG entirely because I'd already gotten sick of just sitting there on the ground on my hands and knees; the visuals of it just reinforced how I already felt about the situation, which is that I was a weak fool who shouldn't have ever bothered. With Helldivers, I have a brief moment of frustration, then it throws me back into the fight and I have bigger problems to chew on; honestly, I think that the fact that I'm able to immediately get back to playing the game that I am attempting to play, rather than just having to sit there and crawl around in the dirt, helps a lot. I should note, though, that these views on my part may be unique to me. I have almost no suspension of disbelief whatsoever; I can count on my fingers the number of games that I've ever played in my life that I felt truly and fully immersed in, rather than just seeing it as controlling pixels on a screen even in the moment. Because of that, and because every other game ever made is designed on the mentality of 'if you die then you are bad and lost' and it's hard to break that mental loop, I still feel like I'm wasting my own and everyone else's time. I fully and entirely grasp the themes, the satire, the reasons why this game's death mechanics are better than any other game I've ever played... but that doesn't rewire my brain to not hate it when it happens.
I still remember when I was playing with mt wife and I yelled out "No rover No!!!!" like a neno second before some ones rover guard dog killed me. All for the name of liberty !
I would argue, perfect balance in a PvE experience is not necessarily desireable! There's no other team we're treating unfairly, I think balancing should bend a little to fun and rule of cool, and I think when players get upset and say the weapons aren't balanced now, they're actually upset weapons have been rendered unfun. RIP the slugger my beautiful stagger baby
I like helldivers but I noticed that it went too far. It's barely a team game anymore. There are almost no mechanics where a teammate is useful. Having a team basically just boils down to more dakka but the obscene amount of dmg any one diver commands means going off 4x solo is by no means bad.
i disagree. other helldivers can progress through objectives faster, they can collect samples (especially for vaults which needs 2 people to open), they might have different loadouts meaning they can more effectively kill certain enemy types that you might not be able to, they could give you a stim, a resupply from their backpack, call down smoke or a shield generator, and they can draw attention away from another player. and the most important: they can reciprocate your high five. you don't wanna be left hanging, do ya?
@@manboy4720 It's not wrong what you are saying but the meta loadouts can deal with any enemy by yourself. Only a few enemies are designed with teamplay in mind (hulk for example). I guess that's why they are a bit confused with the balance themselves. In order to reinforce teamwork a lot of the game systems would require rebalancing. For example, the shield is not great for team play, this is because it has a health pool and therefore breaks far quicker if too much force is concentrated on it (less players less aggro). Most of the team mechanics are fundamentally optional which is not normal in a team game. As an example DRG has fundamentally a shared Nitra pool (kind of exists as revs here but you only draw from it) and every class has a specific team mechanic. Vermintide features disablers which must be removed by a teammate (DRG features this too but far less severe).
@@h4xorzist i do agree that this game definitely has less of an onus on teamwork than games like vermintide and DRG, where sticking to teammates and being a cohesive team are a lot more crucial. all i'm saying is that there is at least a minimum amount of teamwork required to be able to successfully pull off missions. random point, but every person running off solo, whilst having some pros like doing objectives quicker and being more stealthy, it also has its cons. for example, it will spawn more patrols around the individual players. more patrols, then teammates bump into them, which spawns more enemies, and the whole thing snowballs until you're drowning in bugs or bots (i believe this is how the patrols work, but correct me if i'm wrong). so this can actually encourage divers to stay together because the more divers you have, the quicker you can kill the patrols and keep the enemy population down. it's significantly easier to wipe a patrol with another diver. but to be fair, that point does kinda reaffirm your point that the greatest benefit of other teammates is just pure firepower, rather than other, more support/defense-based benefits, I.E. a gunner in DRG using a zipline to help their team members navigate (although that is a loose example because navigating the map is more of a focus in DRG than helldivers 2). i still think being able to have a high-five is the most crucial point, though.
@@manboy4720 You arrived at exactly my conclusion. I think they actually wanted to have the teamwork "work" by having roles like chaff clear, anti-tank and anti-medium. They have repeated some form of that in many patch notes. This only works if you are on top of that balance almost without any failure. And I got to say, if they actually wanted this, they did a super poor job. I do believe weapons like the railgun were supposed to anti-medium but the way they structured the game meant there were strategies like shooting the leg which they didn't account for. Whit such a poor understanding of their own game they never even stood a chance at achieving that. By now the rework to every weapon any enemy would be far too much for the players to accept. (I left Vermintide 2 behind when they did that, tho for no real reason in that game, they just sucked a balance without having an underlying problem.) They will likely be forced now to create mostly jack of all trade weapons alike the AC for bots and the difference of weapons will be mostly by way of feel, operation and what enemy faction you are facing (as this is currently a major balance factor, sadly, making weapons good or garbage most of the time). Ignoring all the things that will simply be subpar and rarely touched of course.
@@h4xorzist wait... this is a comment section, we've been having a polite discourse for too long, i have to throw some really petty insult now and the whole thread turns into a radioactive wasteland. screw you, bro! i don't like your toenails! i don't know what they look like, but i probably wouldn't like them!
4:00 unfortunately, no, it would be a REALLY BAD THING. This is a warhammer 40k scenario where Super Earth is the lesser of all evils, look at both fronts, terminids just want to eat and kill humans, and automotons butcher humans on stone slabs have them in cages. Super Earth may violate a couple of human rights and commit a few genocides but overall, they don't want to wipe out humanity like the other factons
Helldivers didn't fix dying. It arguably made it worse. On top of limited lives and limited, you also have gear that you need to retrieve. Getting killed immediately puts you at significant disadvantage, making it that much more likely you will die again and waste even more time. It can very easily lead to cascade failure more frustrating than any Souls Like boss. Sure, an individual Helldiver dying while the rest of the team maintain control isn't that bad. They clear the bugs and call you at your gear, you pick up where you left all and nothing much of substance was lost. But when you lose 2-3 people? That's a very different story. That's when you get overwhelmed, pushed back away from your gear and usually surrounded due to only having Primary weapons to rely on - which developer Arrowhead explicitly DO NOT want you to be able to rely on. Dying in Helldivers is funny for a while, but that feeling doesn't last long-term once the game starts pulling out more and more bullshit deaths. Falling down a Steam vent is funny. Getting shot through trees isn't.
It is frustrating to die an easily avoidable death in a rough situation, but fighting/sneaking through armies of bots or bugs to retrieve your precious Quasar Cannon armed only with your puny primary and a 500 kg bomb is part of the fun. It really dramatizes the struggle and moment to moment battle decisions, where sometimes you just have to leave the gear and retreat to a safe spot away from the objective where you can call down more gear and/or hold out until you can. The game got a lot easier for me when I realized I didn't NEED to wander through 3 bug breaches to grab my backpack, so I got my squad of similarly weapon-less randoms to bait the bugs away from the objective and we circled around to get our stuff back. One of my most blood-pumping games in recent memory. This was on Helldive difficulty btw, but I normally play on hard so there's no shame in taking an easier mission. TL:DR skill issue, get gud
You say the game’s satire, but it never presents a downside to Managed Democracy. Every planet is strewn with the bodies of people who believed in it to the last
The bones of invading fascists who believed in their cause litter a lot of places, the existence of people who believe isn't by itself evidence. The downside IS the bodies, Super Earth has been the thinly veiled aggressor in all three of it's cannon wars. They invaded the bugs because their bodies decay into space oil, they invaded cyberstan and killed millions over a supposed terrorist attack that killed 8 people, and they invaded the illuminate because they didn't instantly want to give super earth their weapons of mass destruction. If not for the super earth government billions of cyborgs, terminids, and humans would've lived
