Arrowhead CEO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has said that, at times, the team has “gone too far” when trying to balance the game.
Pilestedt’s comments come in response to one Helldivers 2 player, who said they were no longer finding the game fun due to balance changes. In fact, they felt the game had become “unplayable” with the amount of changes over recent months.
“Yeah I think we’ve gone too far in some areas,” the CEO subsequently replied, adding he will now talk to the rest of the team about its approach to in-game balancing. “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed,” Pilestedt said.
When another commenter said they felt every weapon in the game has at some point been nerfed, and as a result a lot of the fun had been removed, Pilestedt acknowledged “that’s not a great feeling”.
In another post on this thread, Pilestedt said he has been seeing “a bit too much balancing using damage instead of other measures such as recoil, reload speeds, accuracy, projectile speeds and equip speeds”. He said that “just tweaking damage numbers is a blunt tool”.
While Pilestedt never referenced a specific weapon nerf during this exchange, there have recently been a number of discussions about Helldivers 2’s R-36 Eruptor and its shrapnel damage over on the Discord.
As a reminder, a couple of days ago the Helldivers 2 team released a patch, with one of the fixes being the removal of shrapnel from the R-36 Eruptor. “This is to avoid cases in which players would randomly one-shot themselves or their teammates in a huge radius around the explosion,” the notes explained. But, some weren’t happy about this change, and let the team know.