Helldivers 2 (PS5/PC)

[Neon Ignition]

Hopefully they get the matchmaking sorted out soon. Once you're in a team it's not too bad but it still takes too long to get into one, then not to end up with errors etc. Got absolutely hammered in the first mission last night and it threw me. When we all got returned to the ship I looked at the map and it was set to Challenging difficulty which I didn't think I'd even unlocked yet. Next mission went much smoother but then time was up due to losing the first 20 minutes to getting a stable team.

[fishbowlhead]

The medals daily challenge yesterday was kill 50 enemies with the 120artilery strike, which just randomly shells a given target area, that was annoying when 4 of you call in at the same time and a huge area gets saturated and you can’t get away.

[hudson]

Damn I forgot it was a daily. I went to bed on 46/50 thinking I'll get the rest tomorrow. *Face_palm

[fishbowlhead]

Damn I forgot it was a daily. I went to bed on 46/50 thinking I'll get the rest tomorrow. *Face_palm

I nearly quit on 46 as well at 11:30pm last night and just thought I’m going to regret loosing those 15medals tomorrow so just saw it through, a very lucky quick match into a defend the area saw it finished in 10mins, a lucky end to the evening.

[Tobal]

I'm not enjoying these defend against the robot missions, just the same circle the wagons for 5 minutes so i can understand why we lost all the planets up for grabs if people just stop playing them cos i'm certainly not doing anymore of them, unless it's a do 8 of these for 12k money challenge.

In other news, i finally unlocked the Breaker Shotgun and shortly after reached level 10, what a beast of gun that is, no point using anything else in the base slot. After that i started do more Challenging level of difficulty to get rare samples but it's not that fun when most missions just throw multiple tankers at you, and whatever handheld weaponry is needed to take them down quickly i don't have yet (suggestions?), so it leads to alot of team mates dropping stratagems on our heads.

[hudson]

Managed to kill a Bile Titan with my hellpod

[fishbowlhead]

Arrowhead REALLY need to pull their fingers out with the server issues and scaling, the game has become so popular so quickly the servers are falling over by the minute and people are getting really pissed off not being able to play it when they actually want too.

Its been a crap show all weekend with it.

[fuse]

I played a few games of this yesterday, and honestly found it a little bewildering to be diving in with 3 friends who've been playing it quite a bit while I'm still getting my head round the button layout and basic rhythms of the game. Very first mission, I was heard on voice comms saying "uh, I think I did a bad thing" before one of said friends then had a perfect vantage point to witness two of us getting blown away by a SEAR strike. Naturally this has been clipped for prosperity / blackmail purposes.

Do feel like the guard rails are well and truly down on this - there are a lot of systems, menus, currencies, configurations to look at, and whereas the folks knee-deep in Destiny and the like may be finding it a bit more familiar, nothing feels particularly intuitive for me right now. Even the bloody reloading is requiring more thought than I would like - you always have to manually reload (even if you keep trying to shoot when you're empty the game won't reload), and for clip-based weapons, reloading mid-clip means you're losing out on the rest of those shots. I know some people are really into that kind of realism, but it wasn't something I was expecting to be presented with in the face of a giant swarm of bugs.

[hudson]

You will soon figure the different systems/mechanics etc. Took me a few sesh's. But it's not too difficult. There's a handful of different mission objectives > extract, but you are free to do any side objectives if you think you have time along the way for more crust. There's the upgrading of the ship which I think uses about 4 different currencies. Why tho? Some currencies can only be found on higher difficulties. This give you something to work towards (progression) etc. Personal gear, hand guns, nades and armour, these can be bought with medals which can be achieved after every mission or sometimes found out on the field.

So the loop is... Do missions and extract successfully. Spend medals on gear, spend sample currencies on your ship which improves stratagems.

Don't reload until you see the clip icon become red. Also, it's slightly quicker to reload a gun that has very little in the mag than a fully depleted mag (yes the game has small detailed mechanics!)

[Tobal]

Arrowhead REALLY need to pull their fingers out with the server issues and scaling, the game has become so popular so quickly the servers are falling over by the minute and people are getting really pissed off not being able to play it when they actually want too.

Its been a crap show all weekend with it.

Just had to abandon a mission which have finished, went in with 4, got everything on the way to extraction, 2 players suddenly drop, stratagems stop working and the extraction timer reused to work. We tried a few things like leaving the extraction area and the 2 of us dying but nope... left the mission to be greeted with a black screen which then turned to the report error. Couldn't play at all last night.

[hudson]

[Lebowski]

333 thousand players on steam at its peak over the weekend, they had to limit servers to 445 thousand so it seems it's a hit on PS5 too, it was regularly hitting capacity as I was getting the server at capacity message last night and had to wait a few minutes to get in. If I were Sony, I'd jump in and offer Arrowhead some help here, as patiences can quickly run out in these sorts of scenarios. If people want to play and can't or are getting kicked, it can quickly turn sour. I was annoyed at it last night as one mission we got to the extraction, and it kicked three of us and only one person got the rewards.

[Tobal]

It's been a proper technical ****-show from the crashes and quickplay problems (still happening for me) to the server problems. I can't think of another live service game as bad as this outside of new MMO launches like New World. They really should have planned for the server issues at least, having confidence in a fun game doing well, released in empty period for big games and at a 'cheap' price. And while they are fixing this, they aren't working on new content which is the true killer of live service games, specially with perception for the masses have been massively skewed by Fortnite.

[fishbowlhead]

333 thousand players on steam at its peak over the weekend, they had to limit servers to 445 thousand so it seems it's a hit on PS5 too, it was regularly hitting capacity as I was getting the server at capacity message last night and had to wait a few minutes to get in. If I were Sony, I'd jump in and offer Arrowhead some help here, as patiences can quickly run out in these sorts of scenarios. If people want to play and can't or are getting kicked, it can quickly turn sour. I was annoyed at it last night as one mission we got to the extraction, and it kicked three of us and only one person got the rewards.

Sony are actively helping already and apparently MS as well as they are using Asura servers, I just don’t think anyone saw this coming it being as popular as it is, the original is a niche fairly obscure title, so to be more popular than Halo Infinite on the opening week of concurrent online players is really something.

Doesn’t help the frustration obviously when you want to just hop online after a hard day.

[Neon Ignition]

I imagine it'll still be borked when I try to get on tonight.