Live Service Games Are Dead, Long Live Helldivers 2
The PS5 console exclusive shows Sony's multiplayer ambitions aren't dead on arrival
Helldivers 2 asks the all important question: what if the fascist space marines in Starship Troopers had really cool capes? The sci-fi extraction shooter pits squads of up to four players against distant planets filled with giant alien bugs intent on killing them in any and everyway possible. Every mission is filled with tension and multiplayer hijinks, wrapped in a parody of chauvinistic militarism. It’s currently the biggest thing on Steam and PS5, and perhaps most surprising of all, it was published by PlayStation, delivering the platforms’ first long-awaited live service hit outside of Gran Turismo and MLB The Show.
I’ve played a lot of Helldivers 2 since it released on February 8 and you could argue that most of that time was spent doing pretty much the those same things over and over: land on a planet, shoot lots of bugs, activate terminals, extract, rank-up. But it’s the way each new outing remixes those elements and suffuses them with a sense of horror and impending doom that makes each mission feel different. Sure some have gone relatively as expected, but most are filled with memorable moments from ragdoll physics and friendly-fire antics to clutch plays that make you feel like you snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and then blew it up with a mini-nuke. It’s a particular mix of silent film slapstick and skill-based tactics that makes Helldivers 2 hard to put down.
It’s also propelled it to over 150,000 concurrent players on Steam, unseating Pokémon With Guns from the top selling spot, leading to all sorts of server issues in the process. A quickplay feature intended to help players easily jump into random matches with one another has been mostly busted since launch. And the unexpected number of players flooding the servers has also led to login issues and performance drops where the game occasionally fails to award mission progress or register unlocks. I’ve also had the game crash on me a couple times, which was painful after nearing the conclusion of a hard-fought mission.
Arrowhead Studio boss Johan Pilestedt apologized for the issues last night on Twitter, explaining to fans just how unprepared the team was for the unprecedented influx of players. “To speak in technical terms, our services as well as our partner services have a rate limiter that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing,” he wrote. “We managed to increase the rate limit from 10,000/min to 20,000/min and the total capacity of concurrent players was increased from 250,000 total to 360,000 total. This was however still not enough as the player count jumped to 360k after 5 1⁄2 minutes.”
While frustrating in the short term, it’s not hard to see why Arrowhead was unprepared to get swamped by new players. A sequel to a 2015 top-down Vita game of the same name, with little marketing or fanfare from Sony compared to first-party games like Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us, Helldivers 2 seemed destined if anything to be one of those games that catches on through word of mouth after the fact, rather than coming out with an immediate bang. It’s perhaps a testament to the lukewarm reception of Suicide Squad and fatigue around games like Destiny 2 that there was space for Helldivers 2 to blow up like this so quickly, even with the launch issues and lack of pre-launch positive review buzz.
I joked about capes at the beginning of this, but they do look exceptional in Helldivers 2, accentuating the John Wick-style stunts you can do like leaping into a sand dune, turning around behind you while still lying prone, and then using a flame thrower to halt the enemy horde’s advance. The game is full of neat moments like this where you briefly feel like an action hero, only to begin panicking seconds later when you forget to manually reload your gun or have to run backwards while inputting a Contra-style cheat code into the computer on your arm in order to call down a missile strike that will destroy the armored bug charging you like a two story rhino. It also looks really pretty at points, with colorful skyboxes and fauna reminiscent of the Killzone Shadowfall sequel we never got.
Spreading democracy doesn’t come cheap
One of the more polarizing aspects of Helldivers 2 is its monetization model. The base game is $40, but there’s a paid battle pass and cosmetic microtransactions. Some things players might have unlocked simply by playing the original are now locked behind a rotating shop. Some premium currency can be unlocked in the free battle pass, as well as collected out on missions. The premium battle pass (called a Warbonds) is another $10, and includes earnable unlocks for actual guns with functional gameplay differences, usually considered a cardinal sin among “pay-to-win” hawks. Throw on top of that the fact that playing online on PS5 requires a monthly PS Plus subscription ($10) and the game is essentially $70.
I think that’s still a fair price for Helldivers 2, but it speaks to Sony’s longer term ambitions for monetizing the game that all of this stuff is nickel-and-dimed out in weird and potentially off-putting ways. Skins are cheaper than in games like Overwatch 2 and Fortnite, but those games are also free-to-play where Helldivers 2 is not. And even though you can earn premium currency in-game, there are clearly dark patterns in it steering players toward just buying the first paid battle pass outright. Where $10 will get you 1,000 super credits, the amount needed to purchase the premium tier, $7 will only get you 525 super credits, barely half of the way there. It feels needlessly stingy, even if I’m having a perfectly fun time playing Helldivers 2 without spending money.
“I'm partial but we really applied ourselves to not make it p2w even though items are functionally different,” Pilestedt wrote in a tweet defending the microtransactions. “The only item that's p2w is the revolver—which will win you any ‘cool gun’ competition. Only (minor) problem is that it's not that good.” The Arrowhead boss later wrote, “If people want to support this title they have an option, but we are never forcing anyone to do so.”
The good news is that Helldivers 2’s battle passes won’t go away, meaning there’s no rush for players to complete them. The bad news is that the game doesn’t have a transmog system, meaning armor sets have certain stats that prevent players from just mixing and matching whatever they want to look cool without worrying about the impact on survivability in missions.
In terms of Helldivers 2’s own survivability, one thing it has going in its favor is how satisfying the underlying loop is. While there’s tons of incidental worldbuilding, the game has no real story to speak of, meaning its long-term health won’t be hitched to continuous updates featuring expensive cinematics or complex narrative developments. Even after the initial wave of players has dissipated, it’s easy to see how Helldivers 2 stays in the multiplayer rotation with occasional updates to gear, enemies, and mission types alone.
Helldivers 2 is the first release in Sony’s controversial plan to deliver over a dozen live service games in the years to come, from new franchises like the heist shooter Fairgame$ to multiplayer spin-offs of existing ones like Horizion Zero Dawn. Sony revealed last year that some of these games had been delayed, while others, like The Last of Us Online, were outright canceled. Considering how poisonous the “live service” label is these days (see: Suicide Squad), it seemed like plan in need of a reboot. Maybe Helldivers 2 will prove that’s an overly reductive view.
“There is a risk that we talk about 'live service' in generic terms–as if it is a single genre, or even a single business model,” Sony’s Herman Hulst told GamesIndustry.biz last year. “PlayStation Studios are making a variety of games that could be referred to as 'live services', targeting different genres, different release schedules, and at different scales. We are also creating games for different audiences, and I take confidence from our track record in creating worlds and stories that PlayStation fans love."
Live service check-in
Square Enix’s Foamstars also arrived last week on PS5 and was free for PS Plus subscribers. That doesn’t seem to have helped the game capture much mindshare, however. The class-based arena shooter where players shoot foam guns and surf on the sticky residue left behind to knock opponents off the stage has shades of a jazz-infused spin on Splatoon 3 but the pieces don’t seem to have come together. Rocket League was the first multiplayer console game to parlay a PS Plus debut into hit status, and few games seem to have been able to replicate that success. It surely can’t help that Foamstars had to go head-to-head with Helldivers in its opening week, and in keeping with Square Enix’s infamously bad track record on monetization, the microtransactions for costumes are insanely overpriced. It feels like Chocobo Racing all over again. Can a game die if it was never really alive to begin with?
Suicide Squad now has fewer concurrent players on Steam than Arkham Knight, the nearly nine-year old single-player game. I was enjoying my time with Rocksteady’s take on the comic book shooter more than many, but Helldivers 2 has now replaced it in my nightly lineup, and I have a hard time seeing myself going back even once the first season’s content drops alongside a playable Joker. The loot is bad. The missions are bad. The boss fights are bad. Unless the season one update significantly overhauls or departs from the base game on one or more of those fronts, it’s hard to see any amount of post-launch content fueling a comeback. I can see a small but loyal (and vocal) fanbase continuing to stick buy it. There clearly big new story beats still to drop in the future too, including the fan theory that the Justice League, including Batman, might not be dead after all. But small and passionate won’t sustain an (I’m guessing) over $200 million blockbuster by a studio with over 250 people working at it.
Diablo IV’s season three has had a rough first month. Season of the Construct introduced a mechanical pet that doesn’t actually do all that much and doubled-down on traps and hazards which can make the dopamine clicker feel like running your hand across a table full of splinters. As a result, the subsequent patches have all been playing catchup, making season three feel like step backwards from the progress made and momentum gained in a relatively stellar season two. Diablo players can, thankfully, finally craft Uber Uniques, protecting them against the bad luck of continually getting rare drops they don’t need or want. At the same time, a cosmetics some players thought were free for the Lunar Awakening event turned out to be paid, reinforcing the community’s longstanding frustrations with a loot game where some of the coolest looking stuff requires entering your credit card number.
Palworld has lost over 60 percent of its players on Steam, one of the biggest drops in the digital storefront’s history, but is still the third biggest game on the platform. Not bad for a game that’s still technically in early access and is almost a month old. Pocketpair promised new pals, player-vs.-player modes, and more in upcoming updates, but for now it’s just been busy patching out all of the game’s bugs on PC and Xbox. “Game is officially dead,” declared one player on Steam. That makes Palworld the first game ever to die while still in the platform’s top-three most played.
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