Helldivers 2‘s new update has delivered an awesome assortment of tweaks, fixes, improvements, and new content that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the community. Its most important feature, though, was the long awaited enemy patrol fix, and something might’ve gotten broken along the way, from the look of things.
Specifically, it would appear that even though Arrowhead Games certainly did do something with the logic behind Helldivers 2‘s enemy patrol spawning, it’s definitely not the way it used to be before the prior major update. In fact, some players have reported that they’re now coming across even more enemy forces than ever before, which is about the opposite of what was supposed to happen. The issue is so pervasive, in fact, that even Arrowhead Games’ community manager has chimed in, promising to look into it further.
Helldivers 2’s patrols might go through a few extra iterations, still
Here’s the kicker: Helldivers 2 comes with over half a dozen disparate difficulty modes for players to peruse at their own pace. This doesn’t mean much in practice, though, when almost every difficulty pushes each encounter into absolute overdrive just for your fireteam to stay alive. The way Arrowhead has handled this aspect of the new update is that they claim to have reverted patrol spawns back to how they worked pre-version 01.000.3000 with “some slight tweaks.” These “tweaks,” specifically, are supposed to make “levels less empty if [the players] are far away from important locations with enemy presence.”
It doesn’t seem to have worked the way it was supposed to, judging by what I’ve seen in action. Now, as a solo Helldivers 2 player, I can absolutely vouch for the fact that the game does seem somewhat easier to play after the latest update: certainly way less over-tuned in the lower difficulties, where I usually stick around, but it’s still a fair bit more challenging than it used to be.
This, too, wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the challenge felt satisfying, but this isn’t usually the case. On the bug front, patrols are now larger and feature more small-scale enemies that will quickly overwhelm you even in the middle of nowhere. On the bot front, on the other hand, it’s impossible to eke out a safe zone the way we once could simply because a new patrol appears just over the nearest ridge. This results in a gameplay experience where there’s precious little downtime, and you’re always running out of key resources.
Whatever the case may be, Arrowhead Games will need to let the community know whether this is the intended playing experience across all of the game’s difficulties, or if the new update is bugged yet once more.
It’s a bit of a bad look, too: Arrowhead Games specifically and very substantially slowed down the game’s update cadence to prevent such problems from taking place. Now, we’re looking at what is either an unexpectedly messed up patrol bug, or the team is still over-tuning the difficulty across the board. Whatever the case may be, I’m hoping Arrowhead explains what’s up sooner, rather than later.
