nanoUFOThe wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook
BigFigOkay yes, but helldivers is still filled to the brim with bugs. Not quite an equal comparison
Edit: wild that fanboys will down vote you for simply stating a fact
ThrowawayOnLemmyPeople talk like it’s game breaking, or completely unplayable. But I have an absolute blast playing this game every night with my friends. Bugs be damned.
I wish the game had single player stuff, it looks quite fun.
halcyoncmdrYou can play the entire game without anyone else. Just close your party and pick a mission. No one will be able to join your in-progress mission if your party is closed. It’s not even that difficult until the higher difficulties, you’ll just spend more time doing things alone without having a full team to sweep through enemies and objectives.
The game is built around playing with a group though, that is how it is intended to be played from the ground up.
I might give it a go, all the reviews I read talked about the multiplayer requirements for the missions and gameplay.
How good is it solo? Have you tried it?
It 100% intends you to play with others. It is not meant to be played single player, it just can be if you insist. You will not get the same experience.
That being said, I’ve played a ton on PC with no mic, just using the in game target and item marking system and a couple text messages occasionally, without any issue. Playing with randoms isn’t a big issue most of the time.
Just don’t take it too seriously. Half of the fun to be honest is not noticing someone threw a stratagem for a 500kg bomb into that crater you’re jumping into kill the bugs and dying to a massive explosion. The game tells you everything a player calls something in and there’s a light from God showing you where it’s going, but sometimes you just miss it. Or the guy was prepping to throw it and died so they dropped it at their feet.
Just don’t take anything too seriously. It’s not that kind of game.
Thank you for the honest take. Sounds like I am going to skip out on this one. Rather learn this way than spend money or deal with the refund process.
It is a great game even if it essentially required multiplayer. You might be able to borrow a friend’s copy through steam’s family library sharing or something like that to try out.
There’s no like ranking system or anything to worry about messing up a friend’s account as a new player.
ForesterI can regularly run suicide evictions as a solo. The trick is to not die because the forced respawns really fuck you over.
Same but i either have an network error or the game closes every other game, which isn't great. Especially after 20 minutes into a mission. I would say i only finish 3 out of 5 games usually. Don't get me wrong, i played like 150 hours, it's still not okay
I had the same issues, was even worse for me. I only got to play 1/3 missions, and had to restart Helldivers everytime I got the disconnection error.
But I upgraded my cpu, and now I have not had a single disconnection error since. Not sure if it’s correlated, but it’s nice not crazhing anymore
I damned those bugs myself with a combo of napalm, flamethrower, and incendiary breaker.
But in all seriousness there are some huge bugs that can ruin a run you spent almost 40 minutes on… So I also bring a 500kg to deal with those.
the way a 500kg can light up the darkest night, its a beautiful thing
I have fun playing it too but it’s definitely one of the buggiest games I’ve played, and while most of them aren’t game breaking, I have experienced a few pretty bad ones. One of my favourites put giant holes in the terrain across the entire map, causing me to get stuck and die several times lol.
CrackhappyI would care about dying a lot if it actually mattered.
Some days I have to restart helldivers after every mission because it crashes during the extraction cutscene.
It’s ok to admit games aren’t perfect while also enjoying them. Helldivers is fun but it’s no paragon of the industry.
Must be a Windows issue. Never once had it crash on Linux.
Same i have friends that have crashed perhaps once or twice a week on windows.But never been an issue for me on linux. Only had it for the last month tho. Could be an older fixed issue as well.
PerogiBoiNot a word of a lie. Filled to the brim with bugs and automatons.
The bugs are quite literally a feature.
There’d be half a game if they took out the Terminids.
Yeah, it’s bonkers it’s been out for months and months and the Spear is still completely broken.
AnyOldName3I just left a game where someone was using the Spear to great effect, although they were finding it a bit of a pain to lock. That’s pretty different to completely broken.
I’m shocked. Every time I use it, I can’t get a lock on anything. When I manage to, it works great, but it’s not worth it for me over the quasar.
redfellowSpear isn’t in a good place, but it works after you learn its kinks. I wish they made the locking work better and added a range indicator when you are aiming it too close, so you know why it’s not locking in that case.
Yeah, in one game I was having issues locking at a big distance. Maybe the hitboxes of the hills the hulk was running across were being funky, so it was thinking it was out of sight. Idk.
We killed 2 billion of them a week ago, but they just keep coming.
Your comment’s score has convinced me that the post is just paid shillery to promote helldivers.
Or we just have no fucking idea what they are talking about and the game works fine for us.
I find the game in general pretty mid. I’d rather play DRG 100% of the time.
That was true when it launched, but past month I’ve had 0 crashing in about 100 hours of gametime. It was unfortunate, but it’s not filled to brim with bugs, unless you’re referring to the Terminids 😄
Helldivers stole the matchmaking form Warframe/Destiny (more Warframe) and I got thousands of hours in both, but Helldivers made it so obscure that I could not figure out how to find a group. I was placed on one once. Then I had a loading screen, then a hidden loading screen (aka "ships fly next to each other sequence"), then walked up to the person I was apparently in a group with, then got kicked, had the same amount of loading, just backwards. After that, I tried several missions, all without any support by anything. The combat system is utterly useless when alone (which I only was because of matchmaking). I refunded this very undercooked game.
taazYou know what, I am gonna call skill issue.
I get that the “press R to join a group” can be overlooked or that not everyone has the intuition to click on the active missions on a planet (alright, these are currently bugged and do not refresh quick enough so always full).
But all one has to do is to do a quick google search to find out you just open the big holo planet and press R, there are also definitely worse offenders in cryptic/useless UIs.
I do have to generally agree, however this is also easily the weakest part of the game. The game doesn’t hand hold you through explaining everything with full screen explanations like some games, and there’s a lot going on with the map screen to notice the difficulty and matchmaking functions when you first jump into the game. However, it is right there. The first couple missions it steers you towards are so simple and short you definitely don’t need teammates to complete, and from my experience they basically assume you won’t have any. After you play a couple short missions alone, it makes sense you’d look at more in the interface, it’s not rocket science.
However, the high number of loading screens and animations to get into and out of a party simply to make it “look” nice is absurd. An animation of the ship jumping to a planet, then an animation of you coming out of a pod onto the ship, then if you are kicked an animation of you doing the exact same thing back to your ship, taking 30-60 seconds to run through. Animating it all for a single ship to deploy from, versus a standard matchmaking room is just a waste of time for matchmaking. It looks cool and for friends is awesome, but to just play the game, it’s a massive waste of time. This is made even more annoying with players kicking people from their teams for any number of reasons so all of those nice looking loads just waste that time and the kicked player then needs to walk all the way back through their ship to get to the map and try again. This is the most annoying part of getting kicked honestly.
I think part of this is also a good chunk of the community either not knowing how, or not utilizing the party privacy functionality. So people aren’t putting themselves into things like friends-only or closed parties when they don’t want to play with randoms. And then there’s always the toxic players kicking people simply for not playing the meta.
A party leader kicking players within a couple minutes of joining a party should negatively affect that player in some form to ensure people use the privacy system correctly and help stop some of this meta toxicity. Like an inability to call stratagems for some time in mission (and it not counting until actually playing, so they can’t just sit on the ship to wait it out). They already have the in game propaganda system setup, declare the player anti-democratic or something to make in game punishment seamless with the lore.
Of course, this can be described as a skill issue. Yet, the OP states that games get better and more polished if you let “Developers cook”, using Helldivers 2 as an example. My reply was that the game is not an example of what I'd call “polished”.
kaduEh, there’s a lot that could be said about Helldivers, at least as a PC port.
Great game, nice content delivery, very cool. No DLSS, no modern FSR (it straight up uses an horrendous implementation of FSR 1.0), very bad usage of multiple threads, quite a few bugs.
Again, the game itself is very fun. But I’m absolutely not going to praise this port and claim it’s a shining example of developer quality.
It’s using an ancient discontinued engine. Hopefully we see improvements with time
Releasing a perfect game that doesn’t have any bugs isn’t what the article is about.
It’s talking about teams that have honed their craft over many years of developing titles they cared about working on and investing in continuous improvements, of which both Arrowhead and Larian have done.
That’s true for virtually every game. Diablo IV: hated by many, considered a major downgrade, Blizzard bad, gets boring, doesn’t handle live content updates right… yet go watch the videos with the team that designed the dungeons and the assets, they’re extremely passionate, they are proud of their work, they explain how they spent a looooong time just working on little details they thought people would appreciate.
It’s super unfair to raise Helldivers and Baldur’s Gate to this elevated “worthy passionate developer” status and disregard others while, at the same time, being selectively blind about the issues both of these games had and still have. In fact, Baldur’s Gate straight up required months of Microsoft intervention to finally (partially!) fix CPU affinity issues.
Most devs are passionate about their work, but the point is that the company around them needs to give them enough time and flexibility to make something great. Diablo 4 didn’t have that, but BG3 did (I can’t speak to helldivers because I haven’t played it enough yet).
It’s almost as if it’s not so simple to just make statements about how to make good games
you can be incredibly passionate while still having mbas breathing down your neck
if you don't think there was a ratio of developers to neck-breathers of at best 2:1 at blizzard you have more faith in their internal management than me
You need to touch grass I think.
Great argument!
Somewhere along the way I lost the verve to argue about this kind of thing. It’s not that I can’t, I just don’t care anymore
Then why are you here, trying to start arguments?
if you respond to "touch grass" with anything along the lines of an imperious "hah what fallacious and illogical reasoning" while pushing up your glasses on the bridge of your nose, then yes i think it might be meadow time for you
I know this is tangential to the argument at hand, but you guys reminded me I really need to touch grass, I’ve been buried in way too much work. I think I’m going to drive out to the coast and stare at the waves for 30 min today.
I have no idea how to respond to this lol, I couldn’t understand a single phrase on this comment. What’s anything got to do with anime here?
yeah but ultimately it doesn't matter because the end product is good on the whole
i feel those kinds of details are exactly what meddlers would want to meddle in, when the entire argument of the article is that the game manages to be good on the whole not despite its lack of meddlers but because of it
quite a few bugs
Those are a feature.
☂️-also no rebalancing the games progression so you can shoehorn mtx into it helps a lot too
ampersandrewI expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not “unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory” good
It continues to boggle my mind that people will take this objectively bad thing built in to the game’s design and turn it into good press. Being unable to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. They could have let you host the game yourself. Yes, even the dungeon master part that Joel does. That they don’t let you not only leads to login problems with unexpectedly populous launches but also an expiration date that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t even have when it comes to online multiplayer.
Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can’t let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?
Having launch issues seems to be the norm nowadays.I do lot think anyone expects complex software to be bug free.
But the response and speed of fixing issues from arrow head are very good, and an example for others to follow.
Dedicated servers are awesome tho. And all great games have that. Makes the game live forever if the community cares enough. Cnc renegade and enemy territory still have players.
Considering Helldivers 1 just finished it’s 135th War cycle, I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side. Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.
I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side
It’s actually inevitable.
Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.
I’m pretty sure I can count on my fingers the number of games that have actually patched their online-only functionality to work offline. Off the top of my head, it’s just Knockout City, and I think maybe a Gran Turismo game somewhere along the line.
It is a possibility for sure, but HD1 is still going after 8 years, and because AH doesn’t host the gameplay servers, I reckon the server costs aren’t excessive.
L4D2 is 15 years also, and still going, and still played. I hope and trust HD2 will be up long time.
Left 4 Dead 2 has LAN. “A long time” is still worse than forever. It would be a damn shame if your favorite movie made before you were born didn’t survive long enough for you to enjoy it. And the more expensive it is to build and operate a given live service game, the shorter its lifespan is. Games like Warhaven and Hyperscape didn’t even last a few years.
It’s Match Making isn’t peer to peer, and requires a connection, though. I’d reckon the playerbase to wither quikcly without Valve servers and/or Steam friend list, even though technocally possible, and a 3rd party could devise a system of finding players.
Valve offers ubiquitous matchmaking services as a part of Steam. They operate as long as Steam does. They’re funded by all the revenue that comes in every time anyone makes a purchase on Steam; these same services apply to third parties who choose to use them, too. Helldivers 2’s servers are run by some function of Arrowhead and Sony, and they shut down when Helldivers 2, in particular, stops making money, rendering the game inoperable.