Helldivers 2

[mercerxiv]

Is anyone still playing this? I know I'm not.
Was browsing some youtube slop and this popped up, and after watching it I'm inclined to agree with most points and point towards them as all the reasons I stopped playing and lost interest.

[Oyster Sauce]

He's a streamer so I know without watching that he's wrong and gay

[Finarfin]

Let an AI summerize this:

Game Design and Balance Issues

The game's balance choices for enemies and weapons are ruining fun and fantasy, with many changes being overly niche and removing otherwise enjoyable elements without justification.

Weapon design is flawed, with many weapons having terrible ergonomics, such as the stim pistol with 30 spread, making them unusable for players.

The armor system is problematic, with pieces taking aspects of different armor and combining them illogically, exemplified by the new Dune armor having 40% resistance to various damage types but 20% throwing distance, which is 10% less than other armor.
Difficulty and Enemy Design

The game's difficulty focus is arbitrary and lazy, with changes making the game more challenging in fourman groups, such as alpha commanders not spawning minions for the host but spamming more commanders in solo and duo groups.

Enemy design is flawed, with many enemies having no meaningful counterplay, like the Dragon Roach, a flying bio titan with similar break points to a regular bile titan but deadlier, faster, and with broken hit boxes.
Developer Approach and Criticism

The game's developers are criticized as "spreadsheet warriors" focusing on numbers rather than game design and balance, leading to a lack of understanding and failure to address core issues.

The game's development is described as potentially incompetent, ego-driven, or intentionally sabotaging itself to save on server fees.
Gameplay and Feature Concerns

The game's modifiers remain boring and unfun, with examples like invisible bug spores and the illuminate faction having 7-minute extraction times at one point.

The focus on Grunt Fantasy has led to issues like nerfing the FRV to prevent reloading while driving and enforcing strict metas with hard nerfs to shields and railguns.

Balance is severely broken, with certain guns being overpowered while others are underpowered, such as the Liberator assault rifle doing minimal damage compared to the Coyote, which is overpowered in relation to assault rifles.

[mercerxiv]

Yeah, sounds about right if you look past the usual AI gaffes.
Basically, it's ****** balancing for "balance" rather than fun, making really weird choices for what weapon should be considered a "baseline" for balancing other guns around it (it's ******* Liberator), and just seeming clueless when it comes to adding more guns and then being befuddled why nobody wants to use a gun that's more likely to hit yourself rather than a thing you're aiming at. enemy design being **** and mostly boiling down to "here's a variant with more health, oneshot aimbot weapons, armor over previous weak spots, and ******** hitboxes, now kill it with a light penetrating liberator and a toothpick, oh, and there's 5 of these guys spawning every minute".

Personally, I dropped that game a while ago because for me it was:
- Despite new enemies the gameplay was getting stale and too focused on just on ramping up how much damage the enemies can dish out, and how badly you are getting swarmed.
- Rewards still suck for the most part. New guns were just minor variations of old guns, some actually worse, new armor mostly looks ugly, grinding supercredits gets boring pretty fast.
- Weapon attachment system was a complete flop, with unattractive (both visually and gameplay-wise) attachments that most of the time didn't move the needle on gun's usefulness.
- Fun guns getting repeatedly nerfed to make room for Liberators, fun strategies getting patched out (like climbing stuff with a jetpack), jeeps not getting any meaningful improvements, and instead getting nerfs.
- Same **** but in the spore fog at night fatigue.