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Nathan Grayson
Remember when everybody was awooga-eyes in love with Helldivers 2? When the whole world had Joel Fever and every inch given or taken in the game’s endless intergalactic tug-of-war elicited gasps from onlookers? That was six months ago. Now each week brings some new lamentation about balance changes or declining player counts. The honeymoon period is over, replaced by the kind of shapeshifting malaise that’s come to characterize pretty much every other live service game.
Right now Helldivers 2 players are fuming over changes that weaken the game’s flamethrower, to the point that some have elected to let Super Earth itself burn in protest. This follows controversy over balance changes in June, which followed controversy over balance changes in May, and, well, you get the idea. Developers have responded with attempts at placation while continuing to push a Sisyphean pace only partially of their own making. While it’s true that Arrowhead came out the gate exceedingly hot, delivering twists and updates at an astonishing clip, that’s not really the core of the problem here. Rather, Helldivers 2’s entire pitch – the promise of granular reactivity that it’s struggled to live up to, especially where balance is concerned – was born of a landscape that’s unsustainable.
The “live” part of live service, somewhat paradoxically, is pretty much guaranteed to result in a death spiral. Players will eventually get their fill of what’s available and become dissatisfied. They will then begin to let developers know, first a few at a time, until others catch up in terms of progress or even just hear about it on a subreddit, at which point the problem becomes an avalanche. After that, it’s a race against time to add more content and turn community sentiment back in developers’ favor – a race they will never actually win, because it always starts over hours after an update goes live.
The team behind Helldivers at least had the right idea: Instead of over-relying on Destiny 2-style expansions that take years to develop, they built a game around an ever-shifting conflict whose parameters are relatively easy to tweak. This ensures that the game continues to feel alive even when the team is mostly heads-down on additions that won’t see the light of day for months.
But even then, as Helldivers 2 has shown us, there are simply too many competing interests vying for developers’ attention. A vocal faction of the fan base will almost always be upset, giving off the impression that something is wrong, which content-hungry YouTubers, streamers, and websites will seize upon. They can support this claim with all sorts of supposed evidence, like the aforementioned dwindling concurrent player count – down from hundreds of thousands on PC when the game first launched to around 30,000-50,000 now. Never mind that most games would kill for 30,000-50,000 concurrent players and that many will likely return when the long-awaited third enemy faction makes its debut; people will still say that Helldivers 2 has suffered one of the most precipitous falls from grace of all time, that it’s a “dead game.”
None of this should surprise anybody who’s played any other live service game, the most successful of which have bounced back from being “dead” too many times to count. The issue in the eyes of many, I think, is that Helldivers 2 was supposed to somehow be different. On paper, it had everything figured out, not to mention a truly immense stockpile of goodwill to blow through. But the live service model doesn’t allow for happy endings – just bickering trudges up mountains whose peaks are shrouded in suffocating fog.
On multiple occasions, Arrowhead has attempted to demystify its process, to explain why elements of the game aren’t where players would like them to be yet. Most recently, CEO Shams Jorjani said in Helldivers 2’s Discord that “we have long lead times on development” and “some changes take time before they show” while, at the same time, the company is still trying to figure out how to cater to a much larger audience than it was expecting.
"We know the [three hour] a week casual dads play differently and want different things than the [thirty hours] a week [high difficulty] crowd,” Jorjani wrote. “We haven't quite figured this out, and it's really new territory for us."
This is a completely understandable state for an overnight success like Helldivers 2 to be in after just six months. In a more reasonable gaming ecosystem, most people would react to this by either putting up with mild annoyances for a time or by stepping away to play one of a million other games until Helldivers 2 was more to their liking. Perhaps they have! But that’s not the portion of the player base that dominates the conversation or sets the pace at which developers are expected to work. What we get instead are communities that constantly rile themselves up, that live perched on the precipice of outcry. Developers – even ones as forward thinking as Arrowhead – find themselves on the defensive, rolling with the punches rather than putting their best foot forward. It’s exhausting to watch, let alone be a part of.
There are some bright spots. It’s been cool to see the developers behind World of Warcraft figure out unique ways to remix pre-existing content, to find new means of keeping the game feeling lively during periods of between-expansion dormancy. Hopefully other studios can learn from their example, though obviously WoW has a lot more locales, quests, and characters with which to work than most other games. Sometimes you get redemption arcs, too; Destiny 2 looked like it was on the decline for years until The Final Shape came out in June and was greeted with immediate adulation.
But Destiny 2 is also illustrative of where live service games can end up in more dispiriting ways. It’s no secret that Bungie’s studio culture has spent serious time in the toilet both pre- and post-Sony – that whether it got acquired or not, there was perhaps not a world in which its approach to live service development was fully sustainable. Now the company is being ravaged by brutal mass layoffs, and the future is not looking bright for any of its games. But that’s the thing: some sort of end awaits every so-called “forever game.” And ends, no matter how promising their starts, are rarely pretty. |
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