habitual overthinker that I am, I often end up wondering what makes some games interesting/tolerable where similar ones fall flat. I recently got into helldivers 2 thanks to being gifted a copy of the game by a metamour, and it’s a lot of fun to play with my gf + her other partners, but I’m also like... not living under a rock. I’ve been paying attention to the state of the world.
on some level, it feels incongruous that I get so much enjoyment out of a game about “spreading managed democracy” to the corners of the galaxy down the barrel of the biggest guns you have the permits for, despite the disgust I feel towards the violent and vile destruction wrought by america and its allies going on literally as I write this post, to often similarly-justified ends.
however, enjoying violence in fictional settings is not something I feel like I need to justify to anyone, and despite my distaste for guns in real life, their presence in games doesn’t inherently bother me. it’s all a matter of tone and context, and mostly, I find the tone here to be tongue-in-cheek enough to keep it from feeling actually bleak. the violence is overkill to the point of slapstick, the dramatic moments are all self-produced, and the stakes are low enough that if you get absolutely demolished by a cyborg planting a boot on your face or accidentally blowing yourself up with your new gun, you can’t really say you harmed the war effort.
it is essentially a giant wargame with a GM running the grand narrative, issuing new orders for the playerbase to contribute their efforts to, and three big factions of common enemies to face down, with various stupid developments leading to a real diegetic history that loretubers and wiki custodians love to track.
the community’s role play of being the painfully “AMERICA, FUCK YEAH” coded, starship troopers (movie)-ass wave of bodies and lead is always a case of schrodinger’s asshole; when the entire bit is military-coded, it’s always gonna be hard to distinguish, at first glance, who’s a little too attached to getting to behave like a fascist. it’s maybe not surprising, then, that I tend to find my enjoyment from the game itself, and not interacting with the community; I’d rather not run things with randos, generally, given that while it is a co-op game, you can still get hit by friendly fire, both mechanically and socially.
the joy of this genre hits, I think, because it boils down to the simple fact that there are actual common enemies. the fantasy is that there is a real unity to humanity, and inside this magic circle, we are all teaming up to go fuck up those bugs, or those bots, or those squids, because we’re all on the same team.
it’s a shame that fantasy seems to be even more far-fetched than I had previously thought!
on february 27th, a user (since deleted) on the helldivers subreddit offered to donate $1000 to a charity of arrowhead’s choosing if they uploaded a video of four of their developers playing an entire operation on oshaune (the site of the major order at the time) on the highest difficulty and completing all the objectives in each mission. this challenge was meant to be a cheeky little callout about the state of balance and bugs that need fixing in the game, given sentiment on long-standing issues around both and some folks wanted to demonstrate that the people making decisions on balance don’t have the hands-on experience with the actual state of the retail game to relate to any of their complaints. it really was not that big a deal.
on february 28th, a second (unrelated) user then matched the $1000 charity donation offer with a new requirement: specific loadouts to demonstrate how underwhelming certain arsenal options were in the face of the challenges being thrown at the playerbase. game balance is a mess at the best of times, but I feel like these two challenges were reasonable enough in their attempt to get the developers to get some outside-the-dev-environment perspectives on how their work was... working. or not.
for what it’s worth, the arrowhead CEO, shams jorjani, seems to have made an actual effort to work up to doing the challenge with the loadout assigned to him. alongside the myriad complaints from the single-issue gamers on the reddit about how he, the CEO, didn’t know everything about the game nor did he have everything unlocked, people appreciated that someone was willing to pick up the gauntlet that had been thrown.
however, much like how some jackasses get a little too attached to acting like a fascist given the first chance, there are some people who really just cannot help but be simps for the devs; those people apparently took the original post as a slight against their unassailable targets of affection, and decided to harass them over it, to the point of sending death threats, doxxing them, and getting them banned from the horse sanctuary they volunteered at. further updates have indicated they’ve also lost their job because of this!
these glazedivers, as they’ve been referred to (because they love glazing arrowhead and the state of the game), have apparently gotten away with it, too. arrowhead’s official reddit account released an announcement that they were “keeping an eye on the situation”, which was followed 15 minutes later by a post from the head mod of the subreddit essentially saying to never offer challenges to either arrowhead or other players.
the next day, they posted an amendment in another post, this time saying that such challenges were allowed, but only if they were first approved by moderators... in this particular reddit, where the climate is already trending towards limiting the expression of negativity to a degree where people feel they need to have alternate forums for chatting about the game’s sore spots. it isn’t exactly going over well.
and like. man. what do I fucking do with this? I want to enjoy this game. I want to be able to submerge myself in this magic circle once in a while, and play the stupid video game where my little action figure of a soldier shouts “SWEET LIBERTY, MY BLOOD” because I screwed up dodging some robots. but damn. anything with a sizable playerbase is due for some nightmare behavior. and not being able to complain about the game balance lest you get doxxed and fired because some single-issue dipshit with no perspective wants to tell you to git gud with as many slurs as they can get away with just makes me go... what am I doing here?
this probably wasn’t the first time this fandom has done something so asinine. nor will it be the last, nor is it isolated to this IP, but somehow, here, it feels even more disappointing than usual.
my suspension of disbelief dies to friendly fire. in the face of an overwhelming threat, we can’t even play at being united. it’s not enough to win, they must prove themselves The Bestestest, so when they die, petty, bitter, and alone, they can be the most important corpse on display for all the world to forget.
