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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I love Helldivers 2, but from what I can tell it's a bunch of enthusiasts using a relatively broken engine to try to do cool stuff. It almost reminds me of the first pokemon game. I'll bet there's all sorts of stuff they get wrong from a strictly technical standpoint. I love the game so much I see this more as a charming quirk than I do something which really deserves criticism. The team never really expected their game to be as popular as it's become, and I think we're still inheriting flaws from the surprise interest in the game. (some of this plays out in the tug of war between the dev team's hopes for a realistic grunt fantasy vs. and the player base's horde power fantasy.)

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The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game.

When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.

Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times

It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.

All other games from the same studio have the same features.

In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.

The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it.

The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.

Just accidentally smashed some teammates with an eagle napalm instead of eagle smoke before I saw this.

Almost certainly this occurred on a Rapid Acquisition Mission on K.

It's actually a really nice spell casting system. It lets you have a ton of different spells with only 4 buttons. It rewards memorizing the most useful (like reinforce). It gives a way for things like the squid disruptor fields or whatever they're called to mess with your muscle memory while still allowing spells. It would be way less interesting if it was just using spell slots like so many other games.

I think it has the best explosions in any game I've played too. They're so dang punchy. Combined with their atmospheric effects (fog and dust and whatnot) frantic firefights with bots look fantastic.

A lot of people in the comments here don't seem to understand that it is a relatively small game company with an outdated engine. I am a lot more forgiving of smaller organisations when they make mistakes.

The game has semi-regular patches where they seem to fix some things and break others.

The game has a lot of hidden mechanics that isn't obvious from the tutorial e.g. many weapons have different fire modes, fire rates and stealth is an option in the game. The game has a decent community and people friendly for the most part, it also has the "feature" of being able to be played for about 20-40 minutes and you can just put it down again for a bit and come back.

The bad tutorial at least has some narrative justification. It's just a filter for people who are already useful as shock troops with minimal training.

I also think that the tutorial would be tedious if it went through too much of the mechanics. They show you the basics, the rest you pick up through trial and error.

aye. give me the 3 minute tutorial, not the 37 minute tutorial.

i want to play the game, like now, and i'll read the forums after i figure out that i'm missing something imporant

Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways.

The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay.

I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.

The tutorial is just fine - here's a gun, here's how you shoot it, here's how you call reinforcements, now go kill some bugs!

considering it still cost 40$ for a 2 year old game, i think they are way beyond the excuse of small team low budget trying to make cool stuff. They have receive shit tons of money and are way to late trying to optimise the game. When it came out it ran so pisspoor i shelved it for a long time. Trying it recently its only marginally better. its really poorly optimised, and blaming old tech is nonsense.

People make much more smooth and complex experiences in old engines.

You need to know your engine as a dev and dont cross its limits at the costs of user-experiences and then blame your tools....

The whole story about more data making load times better is utter rubbish. Its a sign of pisspoor resource management and usage. For the game they have, they should have realized a 130GB install is unacceptable. It's not like they have very elaborate environments. A lot of similar textures and structures everywhere.. its not like its some huge unique world like The Witcher or such games...

There is an astronomical amount of information available for free on how to optimise game engines, loads of books, articles, courses.

How much money do you think they have made so far?

"Arrowhead Game Studios' revenue saw a massive surge due to Helldivers 2, reporting around $100 million in turnover and $76 million in profit for the year leading up to mid-2025, significantly increasing its valuation and attracting a 15.75% investment from Tencent"

75 million in profit but can't figure out how to optimise a game engine. get out.

It costs $40 for a 2-year-old game because the market is bearing $40 for a 2-year-old game.

If anything, it's a testament to how good a job they've done making the game.

The most recent Battlefield released at $80. Arc Raiders released at $40 with a $20 deluxe edition upgrade. I think $40 for a game like Helldivers 2 is totally fair. It's a fun game, worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime.

> worth at least 4 to 8 hours of playtime.

Is that supposed to be praise?

Its also wrong. With 10 hours of helldivers 2 you havent seen much of the game at all.

I played it a bit after release and have 230 hours. I liked the game and it was worth my money.

Yeah, I meant "at least" 4-8 hours. Even if you get bored and give up after that, you've gotten your money's worth, in my opinion.

I have almost 270 hours in Helldivers 2 myself. Like any multiplayer game, it can expand to fill whatever amount of time you want to dedicate to it, and there's always something new to learn or try.

I would say until you are about level 60 there are a bunch of mechanics that you won't understand.

> Like any multiplayer game, it can expand to fill whatever amount of time you want to dedicate to it, and there's always something new to learn or try.

Generally at this point I normally do runs where I go full like gas, stun or full fire builds.

It's a comment about cost-to-hourly-entertainment. eg: if in the general sense you're spending $5-$10 per hour of entertainment you're doing at least OK. I understand that a lot of books and video games can far exceed this, but it's just a general metric and a bit of a low bar to clear. (I have a LOT more hours into the game so from my perspective my $40 has paid quite well.)

Ah sorry, I thought "at least" would carry this statement. I've played Helldivers for more than 250 hours personally.

For some reason, though, I tend to compare everything to movie theater tickets. In my head (though it's not true anymore), a movie ticket costs $8 and gives me 1 hour of entertainment. Thus anything that gives me more than 1 hour per $8 is a good deal.

$40 / 4 => $10/hr

$40 / 8 => $5/hr

Thus, I think Helldivers is a good deal for entertainment even if you only play it for under 10 hours.

Thanks, I get what you meant now. I've never liked this comparison because I don't find movie tickets a particularly good deal, but that might just be my upbringing.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to be - it's an online co op game, not a story-driven one like the 4-6 hour FPS games that was a norm at one point.

It's the kind of game where some people spend thousands of hours in, well worth the $40 to them.

What does the age of the game in years have to do with anything?

A fun game is a fun game.

Compared to the bigger gaming studios they are small. In fact they are not that much larger than the company I work for (not a game studio).

The fact it is un-optimised can be forgiven because the game has plenty of other positives so people like myself are willing to look over them.

I've got a few hundred hours in the game (I play for maybe an hour in the evening) and for £35 it was well worth the money.

A lot of things suddenly made sense when I learned their prior work was Magicka.

oh no

I never played Magicka, but the reviews seem fine (76% GameRankings, 74/100 Metacritic, 8/10 EuroGamer, etc.)

Was it a bad game? Or jankey? What parts of Helldivers are "making sense" now?

Not op, but magicka is a pretty fun game.

You cast spells in a similar way as calling in strategems in hd2.

The spell system was super neat. There’s several different elements (fire, air, water, earth, electricity, ice, ands maybe something else. It’s been a while since I played). Each element can be used on its own or is combinable. Different combinations would cast different spells. Fire+water makes steam for instance. Ice + air is a focused blizzard, etc.

there’s hundreds to learn and that’s your main weapon in the game. There’s even a spell you can cast that will randomly kick someone you’re playing with out of the game.

It’s great fun with friends, but can be annoying to play sometimes. If you try it, go with kb/m. It supports controller, but is way more difficult to build the spells.

> maybe something else

Water, Life, Arcane, Shield, Lightning, Cold, Fire, and Earth. [0] It's worth noting that, though you can combine most of the elements to form new spells (and with compounding effects, for example wetting or steaming an enemy enhances lightning damage), you cannot typically combine opposites like lightning/ground, which will instead cancel out. Killed myself many times trying to cast lightning spells while sopping wet.

In my experience, though, nobody used the element names—my friends and I just referred to them by their keybinds. QFASA, anyone?

[0] https://magicka.fandom.com/wiki/Elements

This is the most Helldivers 2 part for me. Spells being intentionally tricky to execute, combined with accidental element interactions and "friendly fire."

Thank you! I haven’t played in probably more than ten years. Makes me want to fire it up for old times sake!

Oh, it's not bad or janky (...okay, no, it was in some ways janky, but on purpose), I loved that game.

But the sense of humor/tone between the two games is very visibly the same thing.

Oh my, I loved that game! It's wild everyone's throwing shade at Helldivers whilst ignoring that it was an massive success because of how fun it is. I've said it before, Dev's are really bad at understanding the art of making Fun experiences.

Is that a negative? All of the "negative" things listed make me think that they are really cool and trying to learn stuff and challenge things.

It's not a negative, at all.

I just shared it because it's sort of like learning Slack started life as the internal communication tooling for the online game glitch, or that a lot of the "weird Twitter" folks started life as FYAD posters - once you know that, you can draw the lines between the two points.

Yeah the "Crash to Desktop" comedy spell wasn't added to the game for no good reason.

I do credit their sense of humor about it though.

This would make sense if it was a studio without experience, and without any external help, but their publisher is Sony Interactive Entertainment, which also provides development help when needed, especially optimizations and especially for PS hardware. SIE seems to have been deeply involved with Helldivers 2, doubling the budget and doubling the total development time. Obviously it was a good choice by SIE, it paid off, and of course there is always 100s of more important tasks to do before launching a game, but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.

>but your comment reads like these sort of problems were to be expected because the team started out small and inexperienced or something.

More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)

> More or less nothing is optimized these days

Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games.

> I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit

I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.

>Not true, lots of games are optimized,

I don't mean this is a counter-argument -- I'm really interested. What are some good examples of very recent optimized games?

BF6 comes to mind, out of newly released games. Arc Raiders too, seems to have avoided the heap of criticism because of performance, meaning it is probably optimized enough so people don't notice issues. Dyson Sphere Program (yet to be released) is a bit older, and indie, but very well optimized.

Thanks for the list -- now that you mention it, I recall being quite surprised to learn that Arc Raiders was not only an UE5 game but would also run nicely on my PC. (I haven't played it, but a friend asked me to consider it) Now that you mention it as well, I think I recall the BF6 folks talking specifically about not cramming too many graphical techniques into their games so that people could actually play the game.

Thanks for the list!

> I recall being quite surprised to learn that Arc Raiders was not only an UE5 game but would also run nicely on my PC

Yeah, Unreal Engine (5 almost specifically) is another example of things that are unoptimized by default, very easy to notice, but once you work on it, it becomes invisible and it's not that people suddenly cheer, you just don't hear complaints about it.

It's also one of those platforms where there is a ton of help available from Epic if you really want it, so you can tune the defaults BEFORE you launch your game, but hardly anyone seemingly does that, and then both developers and users blame the engine, instead of blaming the people releasing the game. It's a weird affair all around :)

Sony also published No Man's Sky.

I'm not sure having the support of Sony is that gold-standard imprint that people think it is.

No Man's Sky didn't have technical issues at launch though, it ran fine for what is was. The problem with NMS was that people were told it would be a completely different experience compared to what it ended up being (at launch).

The game logic is also weird. It seems like they started with at attempt at a realistic combat simulator which then had lots of unrealistic mechanics added on top in an attempt to wrangle it into an enjoyable game.

As an example for overly realistic physics, projectile damage is affected by projectile velocity, which is affected by weapon velocity. IIRC, at some point whether you were able to destroy some target in two shots of a Quasar Cannon or three shots depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing, or not.

> depended on if you were walking backwards while you were firing

That sounds like a bug, not an intentional game design choice about the game logic, and definitely unrelated to realism vs not realism. Having either of those as goals would lead to "yeah, bullet velocity goes up when you go backwards" being an intentional mechanic.

To be clear, walking backwards (away from the target) reduced your bullet velocity relative to the target, reducing the damage you were doing and leading to you needing more shots.

And to be extra clear, either way, neither options makes me believe it was an intentional design choice.

Systems-driven gameplay is an intentional design choice all unto itself

Sure, but that doesn't mean every consequence of that choice is suddenly intentional as well.

It may not be intentional, but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic. How much fun have people had with physics and silliness with Valve's Source engine, which was one of the earlier full physics games? Or going back further, "surf" maps in e.g. Unreal Tournament or CS that abused the movement physics to create a movement puzzle (which, arguably, led to some of the movement mechanics in Titanfall).

> but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic

That you do less damage if you do a certain movement sounds like fun, emergent gameplay? That's not how I understand either of those terms, but of course, every player likes different things.

Surf maps in CS is actually a good example of an engine bug leading to game designers intentionally use it to design new experience, with the keyword being "intentional" since those map makers actually use that bug intentionally. For me that feels very different from engine bugs that don't add any mechanic, and instead just makes the normal game harder.

Thank you for your service in keeping the galaxy safe for managed democracy.

You put the nail on the head with the first Pokémon, but Helldivers 2 is an order of magnitude smaller in the amateur-to-success ratio.

Game Freak could not finish the project, so they had to be bailed by Nintendo with an easy-to-program game so the company could get some much needed cash (the Yoshi puzzle game on NES). Then years later, with no end to the game in sight, Game Freak had to stoop to contracting Creatures inc. to finish the game. Since they had no cash, Creatures inc. was paid with a portion of the Pokémon franchise.

Pokémon was a shit show of epic proportions. If it had been an SNES game it would have been canceled and Game Freak would have closed. The low development cost of Game Boy and the long life of the console made Pokémon possible.

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