Helldivers 2 nerf controversy's back on the menu, as players unleash a firestorm of negative reviews and Arrowhead CEO promises more tweaks

Stop me if you’ve heard something like this before. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead unleashed some weapon balancing tweaks alongside the Escalation of Freedom update, at least one of them was a nerf, and some players really aren’t happy about that.

Yep, forget the new stuff and other tweaks the update included, we’re - for better or worse - back to discourse as to whether the studio bringing us Super Earth’s galactic struggle should be taking so-called meta weapons down a peg, or doing more listening to players who don’t want to see their favourite armaments potentially made a bit less fun to use.

The changes that’re drawing the majority of the flak concern fire-based weapons, which is pretty ironic given there’s a whole fire-themed warbond set to arrive tomorrow, August 8. So what’s Arrowhead done? Well, “adjusted flame effects to work more realistically” and changed the Incendiary Breaker shotgun to decrease the amount of mags it can hold, while simultaneously increasing its recoil.

As about 20 million of the posts on the front page of the game’s subreddit right now convey, those tweaks haven’t gone down well, with some players feeling so betrayed by Arrowhead in their view going against what it’d previously said with regards to taking on player feedback when it comes to these kinds of changes that they’ve left a slew of fresh negative steam reviews.

It looks like just over 1,000 of the latter have rolled in over the past day and a bit, though the game’s overall verdict still sits at “Mostly Positive”. “The developers seem to think that nerfing everything is the way to go, despite it being a PvE co-op game, not a competitive multiplayer PvP shooter,” reads one of these, “If players are having fun, then let them.”

Arrowhead has responded to the controversy, with CEO Shams Jorjani having tweeted: “We've got a ton of players returning to the game to give it a go. We're tracking bugs/issues and planning ahead of the hotfix. I'm getting a lot of feedback on different parts of the update. Different player groups are liking/disliking different things - depending on playstyle.”

“The incidendiary breaker was like 30% of all Terminid sessions at some point,” he added regarding that particular change in a Discord comment, “Very much a meta gun. Is that a problem? Yes. Is it a big one? I don't know. We'll discuss it.”

In another tweet once he’d finished the Discord opinion gathering that comment came as part of, he thanked players for their feedback and said: “We'll be listening more and there'll be more improvements/tweaks coming.”

What do you think of these changes to fire-based ordnance? Have they dampened your enthusiasm for Escalation of Freedom or the Freedom’s Flame warbond? Let us know below!