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PaperclipPerfector
2d ago
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Helldivers 2 was a game I played the shit out of on release. And then, like a lot of people, I gradually fell off. The reasons aren't mysterious:
Another case in point: Arrowhead released not one but two tanks of casemate design, the Bastion and the Maelstrom. The guns point forward, and only forward, with a traverse of about 40° total. This does not work very well, and good luck finding people in public lobbies willing to actually coordinate with you on driving and positioning the thing.
I can see the argument for why the devs want to encourage teamwork. Perhaps it goes like this: a tank one person can solo is a tank that turns the other three players into spectators. Fine. But the observed outcome is a piece of potentially interesting content with no takers, which suggests the design assumed a population of pub players who will coordinate to that degree (they're an endangered species).
All of this nonsense meant I hadn't touched the game in almost a year.
However, I ended up reading, with rather keen interest, about a recent modding renaissance for the game. Kickstarted by modern LLMs, of course. (The older tooling was mostly about swapping meshes and textures in Blender; the new wave goes a lot further.)
Due to the P2P nature of the game's networking, people have been making mods that install client-side yet work in multiplayer, for both cosmetic and gameplay-altering purposes. The most ambitious is an entire fan-run alternative Galactic War with multi-faction battles, a feature Arrowhead's CEO has said would require solving a heap of technical challenges.
In short order we've gotten QOL mods that fix where you can throw stratagems. Mods that let you mix and match armor and buffs, i.e. a transmog system the devs have repeatedly refused to implement. The official line from then-CEO Johan Pilestedt was that it "doesn't make sense", since equipment is supposed to look different because it does different things, and the visual-clarity argument has been repeated ever since. The real answer is that it would get in the way of nickel-and-diming the players, and some players have said as much on the official forums.
Several of the bugs those mods fix have sat on the official to-fix list for months or years with no progress. Stratagem balls bouncing unpredictably off cliffs was listed as a "Top Priority" known issue back in December 2024. I recall that in some cases there were claims of engine limitations preventing a fix.
Well, now we've got random apes with access to Astra or Opus 5.5 making the game the way they want it, in a cave, with a box of scraps.
There's a general lesson lurking here. When a studio says it "can't" do something, that usually means it can't at a price it's willing to pay, and the price of a lot of software labour just fell through the floor. Every "engine limitation" claim was always an implicit prediction that a motivated hobbyist couldn't do it either. Several of those predictions have now resolved, and not in the studio's favour.
I updated the game. Grabbed a bunch of mods, and had a ton of fun. The recent Warhammer 40k tie-in Warbond added a bolt pistol. The game already had a similar gyrojet weapon, the JAR-5 Dominator, which, to put it bluntly, has always been underwhelming.
A quick mod changed mine to fire the bolter rounds, and now it's fun.
Or consider a more cheaty mod that spawns markers for item pickups. Now I get a handful of Super Credits every mission, without spending my limited time under the sun grinding mindlessly. How nice. (I'm aware of the irony that the "cheatiest" mod in my load order is the one that most directly addresses complaint #2.)
Oh, and we can now give the tanks actual 360° turrets. Once again, in multiplayer, with a client-side mod.
The experience has been largely painless. The first public match I joined had some stuttering and de-sync on my end, so I played the rest as host, and it was smooth as butter. Nobody who joined complained of lag or stutter, so I'm not sure whether that first match was a one-off. I had one hard crash in about four hours of play, but I've had that happen in the vanilla game too.
It remains to be seen what Arrowhead intends to do about it. There's been conjecture that they can't do anything, which I don't think is correct. It would just take actual effort on their part. Maybe they can all chip in for Claude Code.
They've been mum so far, even as the community froths over the topic. Unfortunately, the cat is very much out of the bag. I had to try it out and have my fun; the FOMO was too much. I hope this becomes the new normal, and if it doesn't, I'm going to hope someone mods in private (and popular) servers.
There's been some similar drama with Star Citizen. It's an aethestically and conceptually fascinating game, limited heavily by the combination of a) bizarrely poor development priorities, b) incredible bloat in development goals, and c) a financial model that's become dependent on selling ships to whales, d) with corresponding impact on game balance.
The same people who can't get mission selection working reliably are, unsurprisingly, not great at handling game. So now there's 'mods' that allow an offline mode that gets past the notoriously buggy physics sync problems (just fixed literally two days ago), allows spawning in of resources and characters where they wouldn't normally exist, and has been modded with things like a Star Wars Star Destroyer. And CIG has issued takedown notices, with the corresponding totally predictable Streishand effect. This is particularly sticky because the original Kickstarter promoted private servers and modded play, only for those to be removed from the road map and eventually disavowed.
In practice, the shared persistent universe is enough of the call for this game that it's not going to have too many people jump ship. But there's reason CIG is treating it like a nuclear option: even minor improvements to the small team multiplayer environment or to casual gameplay, or for PvE-only worlds, would be something the actual game as presented just can't do, at least from past practice.
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