Wahey, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead says its next update will be giving flamethrowers enough of a buff to facilitate cooking showdowns
"We've heard you loud and clear."
Helldivers 2's community has been asking for buffs to flamethrowers rather than the kind of nerf that fire weapons got alongside the Escalation of Freedom update, and Arrowhead looks to be delivering just that, having now provided more info on just how it's gone about turning the in-game heat back up.
The studio gave us a brief glimpse into its plans for the update, now dubbed Patch 01.001.007, last week. "We are also working towards additional improvements for the flamethrower weapons," was all it wrote then, but here's some info on what exactly those improvements will look like.
"We've heard you loud and clear and Flamethrower damage is increased by 33%," Arrowhead wrote in the first of a string of posts providing more details about the patch in the run up to its arrival on September 17, "Flamer mechanics will be reverted to the state before the Escalation of Freedom update and flamebased weapons can now damage heavier enemies like Chargers, Bile Titans, Impalers and Hulks."
"We just went back," said developer Niklas Malmborg in a short video chat about the upcoming change with Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt, "There was some stuff to go through, but it was the right thing to do." The pair went on to chat about spraying flames at big bugs with help from the increase in armour penetration these weapons are also getting as part of the update, with Pilestedt likening battles with hulks to potentially being like "a cooking showdown".
As alluded to earlier, it looks like this'll be far from the last info drop we get about the copming update, with Arrowhead writing in the tweet: "A buff a day keeps the bugs away. Excited to share more details about upcoming update, which will include significant changes aimed at improving your experience in Helldivers 2. From now on, every day we will shed more and more light on the September 17 update."
On Discord just after this was revealed, while urging players to wait for more updates, Pilestedt offered a bit more explanation of what's gone into the change. "I see a lot of people commenting on it taking long to do a numbers change etc," he wrote, "While it is true in isolation, the update that we are launching now is a much larger holistic take to realign the gameplay.
"The reason why so many of you found excitement in some tools such as the flamethrower, railgun, eruptor, etc, we realized is because they could deal with heavily armored enemies much more effectively than they were supposed to according to how the weapons were portrayed. Therefore the changes we needed to make were a bit larger than just getting the flamethrower back to where it was, also getting other weapons up to the level that where you (and I) feel they all should've been from the start.
"The game experience of this update will be much more substantial in how you play," he concluded, "More tools will be varying degrees of effective and specialized tools will work much better against their intended targets."
Are you excited to try out your favourite flamethrower again once this next big Helldivers 2 update drops? Let us know below!