Bye bye The Finals, hello MANAGED DEMOCRACY!
If you can’t tell, I’m all in on Helldivers 2. Nothing else matters for me at the moment. Not The Finals, not Spider-Man 2, not Jusant, not GoW DLC.
What about all of you? What are you playing this week?
I’ve been playing through FFVII:R+I for obvious reasons, but I also booted up Hell Divers 2 for the first time just today and heard a lot of complaining from my team mate about the default controller configs on PC, the weird directional key combo stuff, and how unclear a lot of the instructions were.
We failed some missions, 40 minutes wasted with zero rewards, because we couldn’t figure out what specific thing the objective indicator was talking about. We failed one mission not knowing how to calibrate a satellite, another not finding any way to destroy a facility, and another not knowing which building was a fuel depot even before trying to figure out how to blow it up. Then, after you’ve watched a YouTube video that actually shows you what your target looks like and how to do it right, it turns out you’re not even given the chance try it again in the game anyway.
I’m not as picky about it as my friend. I absolutely love the music and presentation, but I’m still waiting for it to be more fun than just weirdly convoluted.
I totally get the initial frustration, but I think the game is obtuse intentionally because you are a lowly uneducated grunt in the lore. You are meant to just figure it out on your own. That may seem like a lazy excuse, and it might be, but it’s a design intention. The tutorial is intentionally barebones and then your character is literally cryogenically frozen and then thrown into battle.
The not receiving the rewards is on the server side though. All day yesterday I didn’t receive any rewards, but today they all showed up. That is something that will get ironed out.
The punching in the codes I believe is a balance choice that is there to make it a challenge in the midst of battle so you can’t just spam orbital strikes when you know you’re about to die like most people do with grenades in FPSs. There is a lot of physicality to the game from reloading early making you lose the rest of your rounds, to being able to change machine gun rpms or to check remaining ammo (hold the reload button if you are unaware), to being able to sustain specific limb damage, among other things. In this way, the codes are a gamified version of a soldier calling in an actual air strike in war.
I’m level 11 now and have unlocked a fair amount of cool weapons and strategems. I’m still having a blast.
I just watched the ign review video and saw that you can unlock new strategems. I expect that might impact a few things. Also, I personally like the code system. I think it’s a fun way to feel like you’re punching in codes all the time, but the default controls my friend had on PC had the stratagem directions mapped to the movement directions (WASD), meaning he could not do any strategems while moving like I could with a controller on PS. He eventually remapped them to the keyboard directional buttons, but it seems weird that the default for PC is set that way.
