Helldivers 2 Players Are At War With A Guy Named Joel
Also Nintendo kills Yuzu, Temtem kills itself, and how Final Fantasy VII Rebirth feels like an Ubisoft map game with personality
Malevelon Creek was supposed to be another walk in the park. Instead it was a massacre that no Helldivers 2 player will never forget. A "Major Order" last month called on players to defend the planet of Malevelon after a surprise ambush by the Automatons only for the jungle planet referred to as "Robot Vietnam" to chew through millions of respawns like a massive meat grinder. Despite a community-wide effort across one of the most popular games on Steam and PlayStation 5, players failed to liberate the planet, Malevelon Creek fell, and the secret power of Helldivers 2's Dungeons & Dragons-inspired metagame was revealed.
Beneath the friendly-fire co-op antics and grinding for battle pass unlockables, Helldivers 2 is beginning to weave together an epic war saga in collaboration with its players that few games have ever attempted. Every battle in Arrowhead Game Studios' sci-fi multiplayer shooter contributes roughly .0003 percent progress to a "Galactic War" against killer machines and giant bugs. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt told PC Gamer last week that a Game Master named Joel is at the center of Helldivers 2's emergent post-launch campaign, trolling players in real-time by making certain planets harder to conquer or springing surprise counter-offensives on others. Knowing there's a human hand meddling in the destiny of the Helldivers universe has given fans a final boss to struggle against.
"There have been some sudden moments where maybe one planet was too easy or one was too hard and [Joel] had to get up in the middle of the night to give the Automatons a bit of reinforcements so the players don't take [the planet] too quickly," Pilestedt said. As just one example of the developer's improvisational interventions, Joel unlocked the Incendiary Mines stratagem for all players after an unexpectedly rapid foray into bug territory went soon after the game launched. Anyone who was playing the game then will remember when the fiery explosives randomly started spilling like shattered gumball machines across mission after mission. "Joel, in his infinite wisdom decided, 'What happens when a faction wins a portion of a war?'" Pilestedt said. "Well, they mine everything.' That's where the incendiary mine segment came from."
While Malevelon Creek fell to the Automatons last week (ridiculously hard civilian escort missions didn't help), another planet in the Xzar Sector, a gray swamp called Mort, was saved, though just barely. Players collectively through 10 million bodies to defend it in a down-to-the-wire buzzer beater. "When MORT HAPPENED, Joel sent me a message about watching it all go down and he called it a 'thing of beauty,'" community manager Baskinator told players over the weekend. "I know people are struggling to get on board with the idea that a human is on the campaign instead of an unfeeling computer, but I'll take a human any day."
More recently, players have been called on to go back to defending territory from a new Terminid threat on the eastern side of the Galactic map. Arrowhead initially threw them what looked like a softball, issuing a Major Order to liberate the single planet of Veld, only for Joel to to pump up the bug armies with reinforcements as players flocked to the latest meta-battleground. Every contested planet has a regeneration rate pushing Super Democracy backwards. If enough players aren't completing missions simultaneously, progress backslides. Instead of the standard rate of roughly 3 percent, players on Veld were facing resistance regeneration of around 20 percent, according to PC Gamer.
Helldivers.io is one homebrew site that tries to track the Galactic War's calculus in real-time. And after the defeat at Malevelon Creek, the game's most dedicated players are getting much more serious about the metagame strategy and how to counter Helldivers 2's Game Master Joel. Redditor ghoxen has quickly become one of the community's experts on the subject, sharing in-depth guides on how players can maximize their contributions to the war effort (fight on whatever planet currently has the most players) as well as how to try and cut-off invisible "supply lines" believed to impact regeneration rates on other planets in the system.
When the next Malevelon Creek arises, Helldivers 2 players will be ready, fighting harder and smarter to defy the will of Joel, the Galactic War's own in-game god of destruction. Some fans have already called on the Arrowhead developer to be immortalized in the game's official canon, and all this even though Joel Hakalax (his full name) hasn't even worked at the studio for a full year yet (he was previously a developer on Hearts of Iron IV: By Blood Alone at Paradox Interactive).
But Arrowhead's CEO has pushed back on a growing sense that among some Helldivers players that the game is simply rigged against them, saying instead it's a "push and pull" where most of the backsliding only happens when players go to sleep. "It was just in the first segment we had to get the balance right for several times more players," Pilestedt tweeted. "Now the choices you make are the ones that will happen."
Here's how Joel describes his role on his LinkedIn page: "I engage with analytics and community teams to poke at the game, keeping it engaging while also executing the overarching narrative." Players won't necessarily control how Helldivers 2's overarching war plays out, but they will be the arbiters of its individual battles, crafting the triumphs, defeats, and memes that have thus far instilled the narratively sparse game with so much flavor and meta-textual meaning.
It's clear Arrowhead is just beginning to play its hand when it comes to where Helldivers will go from here. Fans suspect a new faction, the first game's Illuminate, will arrive in the near future, while new vehicles like mechs and Warthog-style dune buggies have already mysteriously begun to appear in "leaked" footage online. And others are hoping for a civil war on Super Earth itself once the war efforts are revealed to be a "false-flag" event to distract from the a revolution from within. Elaborate propaganda campaigns are already one of the Helldivers subreddit's favorite lore-building pastimes.
Pokémon without guns is ending
Before Palworld there was Temtem, an online monster collector channeling the whimsy of the Game Freak franchise on PC. Players travel around floating islands taming wild creatures and fighting an evil organization in the mold of Team Rocket. Kickstarted in 2018, Temtem launched in Early Access on Steam in 2020 and then released in 1.0 in September 2022. It was decent, players enjoyed it, the game eventually came to consoles, and new features slowly got added.
But Temtem never hit in the way Palworld did, and less than two years after its full release the studio behind it, Crema, is turning off in-game microtransactions and walking away from future content updates (a planned PVP draft mode was abandoned). The game will still get patched and servers will stay online for "a really, really long time," while the small development team will now be turning its focus to a Vampire Survivors-like spinoff called Temtem: Swarm.
The studio never mentioned Palworld in its sunsetting announcement yesterday, but Temtem's playerbase on Steam at least has dropped by two thirds since the Pokémon with guns crafting survival sim blew up in January. A recent uptick in negative reviews on Steam acts as a sort of memorial for the short-lived multiplayer adventure, with players bemoaning the grindy currency system and the developers now walking back the "MMO" description used to market it originally. "While Temtem does fit the MMO bill in our eyes, we understand it does not in everyone’s eyes, and that we should’ve acted quicker to curb this trend," the team wrote yesterday. "We apologize for the confusion this might have caused to some players."
“The Map’s Dyin’, Cloud!”
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth came out last week and I sunk about 10 hours into the ambitious and unwieldy remake sequel. It’s a game full of problems that I mostly adore, taking the tightly confined retelling of Cloud and company’s escape from Midgard in the first game and expanding it into big yawning spaces full of items to collect, experience bars to fill up, and mini-games to complete. It’s all supremely polished and feels very good while not moving me emotionally nearly as much as the 2020 game, let alone the 1997 PS1 original.
In many ways it feels like the more conventional open world RPG some fans had been asking Square Enix to make for a decade following the success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and The Witcher 3. Perhaps the biggest direct influence are the modern Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed RPGs, the definitive map games of our age. Though not nearly as crammed with chores to complete and icons to erase off of the screen, a lot of the same logic applies, down to large radio towers you unlock to reveal nearby activities on the map.
What Rebirth has going for it that most Ubisoft map games don’t, however, is a charming cast of strong personalities and a quirky world full of loose threads like some truly weird NPCs who only reveal themselves through a card mini-game called Queens Blood (which while hyped up by the initial wave of reviews I’ve found to be quite underwhelming). All of which is to say that I can’t imagine how I would feel about Rebirth’s open world padding if I was not nearly three decades invested in its world, characters, and plot twists. Even the major story beats I’ve seen so far in Rebirth feel a bit inert compared to the original blocky 32-bit scenes they’re based on. One thing I do love are the beautiful tucked-away vistas that slowly reveal themselves as your party emerges from a mini-dungeon.
Bonus round: The game’s producer and longtime Square Enix veteran, Yoshinori Kitase, recently revealed his perfect console in an interview with Simon Parkin’s excellent podcast: The Legend of Zelda, Alone in the Dark, Hearts of Iron, Factorio, and Final Fantasy VII. He said he only met Shigeru Miyamoto once while Nintendo was prototyping the N64.
The internet reacts to the death of Yuzu
The developers of a popular Switch emulator have agreed to settle with Nintendo after the Mario maker sued them for, among other things, facilitating the piracy of 1 million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom prior to launch. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, the group will also hand over everything associated with the emulator Yuzu and refrain from working on anything like it again in the future. Since the lawsuit didn’t go to trial the outcome doesn’t resolved the legal questions over copyright law and emulation at the heart of the challenge, but it is a huge warning shot to anyone who will be working on emulating the Switch 2 that’s now expected early next year.
An even bigger deal is that the only 3DS emulator, Citra, will also be shutdown as a result of its relationship to the Yuzu team. While there is another Switch emulator called Ryujinx, the death of Citra marks an unprecedented set back for preservation of a gaming ecosystem that Nintendo no longer supports after the 3DS eShop closed its virtual doors last year.
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