Good news, Helldivers 2 mech riders, Arrowhead looks to be considering making your hobby a properly supported feature

Now that the masses of Helldivers 2 have gotten their hands on mechs, it unsurprisingly hasn’t taken very long at all for folk to start incorporating them into bizarrely effective combat strategies. If you’ve spent the weekend riding around atop a robotic death machine, you’re in luck, as Arrowhead looks to be considering making that a proper gameplay mechanic.

Yeah, you read that right, it’s been about five minutes since Tien Kwan was successfully liberated, unlocking the EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits that’d been being teased for a good while, and people have already found a way to casually ride them around. If nothing else, it’s a testament to what the community can do when it’s not too busy arguing about balancing or getting frustrated about hosts who wield the kick hammer far too aggressively.

As shown in the video below, mech riding at the moment involves a ground troop using a jump pack to hop atop the roof of an Exosuit. While it does seem to be decently effective at ensuring that both the rider and the mech pilot have a little bit of extra protection when they head into battle, it does currently look pretty janky, especially from the mech pilot’s view.

We all love a bit of immersion, and having someone be floating in the air a few centimetres behind the mech they’re supposed to be riding as it lumbers across the battlefield doesn’t exactly help that, you know? Thankfully, players have flagged this to Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt, and his answer regarding the potential of adding in a bit of official support for the feature via a future patch wasn’t a direct no.

“Ah! Good point. Lemme talk to [the] team,” were his exact words, in response to a tweet outlining that the main desire some folk have regarding mech riding is the addition of a dedicated button that’ll allow riders to get up there and stand in a fixed spot on the roof that looks a bit less janky.

“It would make it a viable tactic for those who aren't running jump packs and would make it easier for the person standing on the mech to aim and shoot without worrying about falling off (unless they get ragdolled, which would remove them)," the creator of that first clip argued. “You could also expand on it further by making it an official feature with co-op mechanics similar to how two players reload a recoilless. For example, teamwork buffs.”

The big concern, as with most changes Helldivers 2 has undergone so far, is the effect that adding in this kind of functionality might have on the game’s delicate state of play when it comes to balancing. As reflected in the debate these tweets spawned, some folks are concerned that any buffs to how the mech works could make it too overpowered, while others reckon the difference would be negligible on higher difficulty settings, and could maybe be offset by future updates designed to make things more challenging.

Let us know where you stand on mech riding - atop the mech, presumably - and make sure to check out the rest of our coverage of the latest updates on Helldivers 2.