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https://store.steampowered.com/news/?emclan=103582791473678397&emgid=4339866697736692015
Fellow Helldivers,
I want to directly address the feedback you’ve raised about the Escalation of Freedom update. We’ve spent the last week listening to feedback, reflecting about the path ahead for Helldivers 2 and how we want to continue developing the game. In short, we didn’t hit our target with the latest update. Some things we just didn’t get right - and other more fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and game direction.
All of that is on us and we are going to own that. As many of you have pointed out, and we agree, what matters most now is action. Not talk.
To that end, here’s what we intend to do in the upcoming updates.
Our aim within the next 60 days: Continue to re-examine our approach to balance. Our intention is that balance should be fun, not “balanced” for the sake of balance. Update how the fire damage mechanic works to tweak how the flamethrower serves as a close range support weapon. (A quick straight revert won’t work, as it would break other things) Rework gameplay to prevent excessive ragdolling Re-think our design approach to primary weapons and create a plan for making combat more engaging Re-prioritize bug fixes so that the more immediate gameplay-impacting bugs are prioritized. Improve game performance (frame rate is a focus) Rework Chargers
Additionally, from a bigger picture perspective we will be: Exploring creation of an opt-in beta-test environment to improve our testing processes and we consider this a high-priority. Post regular player surveys to gather more insights and feedback from the community. Improve our process for patch/release notes - providing more context and reasoning behind changes. More blog posts and streams where we expand on these topics for those interested. We also want to thank you for your patience. We’re grateful that so many of you provided constructive feedback and suggestions on the latest update.
Mikael E Game Director & Arrowhead Game Studios
I’ll believe it when I see it.
They’ve been putting out similar statements before, only to yet again deliver updates in a broken state where loads of issues persist, get worse or even return. Or features get changed against the community’s desire with seemingly no explanation.
Also, not a fan of players having to do the “opt-in beta-test” to test the game for them. That’s an actual job that should be taken seriously by devs. They have plenty of money and plenty of devs, they should be able to resolve this without players doing their jobs for them.
They were already so close to a perfect game, yet they keep throwing it away with strange decisions just before they hit the gold.
Beta tests are a great way of getting player feedback earlier as well as testing on a much bigger variation of machines.
I know it’s a means to get more information, but there are professional (game) testers who can do this too. What I mean is that it’s an actual job and it just feels like there is next to no QA at the studio internally, despite the fact that this is a very important part of development. I work in a development studio myself and I know as a developer that it’s easy to overlook issues when you’re also the one that has to do all the testing.
Technical issues aside, they also seem to make strange gameplay decisions that don’t sit well with the community. Those opt-in events might be a way to poll what players think. But it seems unnecesary to me, especially with changes that obviously wouldn’t be received positively in the first place. They stated that they can’t roll back the changes because other stuff would break, so even if there was a testing phase with players, it probably still would’ve happened unless they decided to push back the entire update weeks or months ahead. Which I personally don’t mind, but they’ve set this goal/deadline for themselves to release content as a live service kind of model every few weeks, and it’s clearly putting the pressure on.
We’ll see how it goes, I just don’t think that public beta testing will be much of a difference in the end, and it just sounds like some excuse to buy time until they get things straight internally or letting the whole commotion cool down, while giving players the impression they get to play a role in development decisions. But I doubt they’re gonna reverse controversial gameplay decisions, even if we had public tests.
I just don’t have that much faith in Arrowhead, since it’s not the first time something like this happens (not only this game), then promise to do better, and then proceed to repeat their mistakes.
I suspect they do have in-house QA, although it is likely a small team, and even when they do identify a bug the Devs don’t have sufficient time to fix them.
An opt-in test environment is great for testing new features to get feedback and it’s the right move, you can’t have an internal team determine if a new feature is great for the player base, it’d be like Arrowhead giving itself a pat on the back for coming up with a great idea.
Dead by Daylight does the opt-in beta thing. Progress doesn’t transfer from one to the other, but unlocks are handled by just unlocking everything. The bonus of this, as opposed to in-house only, is that players can see what’s coming and give at least some chance for feedback before release. The downside is that there’s only one iteration, beta, then release, and sometimes things that worked in the beta are broken in release. I’m not saying that this should replace an in-house sandbox, but as an addition it helps devs get thousands of eyes on it and lets the community voice issues before they become semi-permanent.