I'm not gonna pull any punches here- I think Live Services are trash and should burn down to nothing alongside with all the failures they've already endured this year. In fact, all my homies hate on Live Services! (>This message is sponsored by the single player gang<) But what if I told you that just like an anime season finale where everybody is at their last post and the antagonist is floating above the scene with a total victory in the grasp of his hands- someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to actually do a Live Service in a way that not only isn't total trash, but is actually starting to take off to a worryingly wide audience. Yes, all of us Live Service haters out there are going to have to start eating our hats pretty darn soon because of all games it was Helldivers 2 that flew down out of the drop ship in order to rain on our parade.
Now I'll be honest- I had no clue what Helldivers even was before that sequel was announced to moderate applause during the PlayStation conference last year. Apparently the first entry was a decently entertaining top-down shooter with pretty heavy Starship Troopers vibes emanating off of it. Helldivers 2 looked to lean even further on those laurels to the point where I actually assumed the trailer was meant to be for a new third person Starship Troopers game before the franchise title flared up on screen. (Although in my defence, I was disadvantaged by my ignorance.) But even those in the know couldn't have had any inkling of a clue what exact impact this game was going to have when it landed, for it's moderate price point, just a few days ago.
We live in an age of 'flash in the pan' hits; wherein one week all anybody can talk about is a Pokemon reimagining and the next week we have ourselves an unapologetically Verhoeven-coded military bug shooter championing co-op missions of bug hunting for the service of Super Earth. Helldivers has been the kind of hit that developers can't even bring themselves to dream of, to the point where servers are literally melting because the team had no idea their player numbers could go this high. Originally it's said that the developers were playing to actually hop onto online games and mess with their player base, whom they expected to be cosy and intimate, but now such a proposition seems laughable with the thousands of concurrent sessions they have being started every few minutes or so. Truly, this month is the month of Helldivers 2. And it's a Live Service?
That's right- despite having an actually sensible buy in price point and a satisfying amount of content off the bat- Helldivers 2 is committing itself to all the carnal sins of modern gaming. It's laying out a continuous development plan, (although I hear that constraints of those plans have stretched significantly given the runaway success of the title.) there are microtransactions, battlepasses and gameplay effecting cosmetics. And yet none of that is being looked down upon. In fact, Helldivers 2 is being celebrated as the one game in the entire industry that does the absolute impossible and gets it right- and I am both impressed and lightly horrified to see how that's the case. Helldivers 2 is about to turn the whole table back around on the 'Live Service' debate.
The defining characteristics of every Live Service in the past few years has been an unfinished game shoved out the door with a promise to make it feel somewhat complete over the next year or so of adding new content. Oh, here's a new map and a bunch of new mission types and enemy variants and weapons. "But of course, that means we need to take out the beginning quests from the game because... well... screw you- that's why." That game will then promote unending quests for players to get lost in, disregarding the fact that all those recurring missions are trash focused around the same three objectives. (Defend the point, kill the bullet sponge, escort the vulnerable thing) Helldivers 2, on the otherhand, hyper fixates on it's design.
Helldivers 2 was designed with the very soul of recurrent play in mind- with the loop of dropping into various hotspots in order to smite the enemies of mankind slipping nicely into the fiction of the world they establish. As does the 'War Bonds' which forms the currency of the in-game Microtransaction store and the provisions of the Battlepass. And just like every game with a Live Service component that isn't quite as hated as others': you can earn currency without spending a dime and buy the pass at your own pace. Also, the Battlepass doesn't expire which forgoes the lamentable 'fomo' aspect that many of the laziest Live Services cling to like it's the only idea of value their company has ever produced. To many, Helldivers is a breath of fresh air.
And to me it's like that first whiff of gas in the canary mine, because I've paid more than enough attention to this industry to know exactly what comes next. Helldivers 2 has every right to be a success, sliding into the goal right as everyone had settled into the very safe assumption that Live Services are dead. Right after Kill the Justice League began it's slow agonising journey to an early death and Pirate ship game (Genuinely can't remember the name, again) face planted on that journey to such an extent I don't even expect it to last the year at this rate. Helldivers is going to be used as the fuel underneath every executive fire for a Live Service future that had just been doused with cold reality- and we're going to be in this exact same position four years from now.
I know what supporters are going to say. "But Helldivers does it right! Surely this game will serve as an example blueprint for these companies!" To which all I can do is sadly chuckle at what naive fools you are. Do you think Helldivers 2 is an easy sort of game to make? No! It takes passion, talent and insight- all the qualities that are whittled down with prejudice by the corporate driven Live Service surge. This game will be used as vindication to keep the Live Service dream alive, and the copycats riding this game's tail will miss the point entirely, crash and burn totally, and further ruin the prospects of the AAA angle of the gaming industry. So thanks Helldivers for proving it can be done, and thanks for nothing for the consequences of that.
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