ranzware
Helldivers 2, as I mentioned last month, has been a complete rollercoaster during its first year of updates. Balance in particular has been a consistent pain point. As in, those funny little patches that make your guns good or bad and start flame wars: The railgun nerfs that launched a thousand ships. And 2025 is kicking off with another one.
The latest in this long line of balance discussions has been inspired by the recent Killzone crossover weapons, whose controversy saw their latter half offered for free as penance. CCO Johan Pilestedt has now waded into the discourse to to dispense some Super Earthly wisdom: “Balance doesn’t matter,” he reckons. Erm.
Alright, in fairness, that’s just one part of a Reddit comment made by Pilestedt on the subject. One weapon in particular has been put in the crosshairs: The PLAS-39 Accelerator Rifle. This weapon is in a bit of a weird spot—it fires a burst of three shots with a mag of nine rounds, as a sniper rifle, meaning it chews through its ammo very quickly. Its damage also isn’t really up to snuff with its inefficiency. In fact, as the author of the thread Pilestedt is replying to notes, it’s outclassed by the PLAS-101 Purifier, a weapon we specifically called out after the huge balance patches back in November as a “bot-killing phenomenon”.
The Purifier is similar to the PLAS-39 in that it’s a charge-based weapon, but it also comes with considerably heftier damage, a more efficient clip, and it has a semi-auto mode for when you do want to spray and pray. It’s both deadlier and more versatile than its Killzone crossover cousin, which would, let’s not forget, have cost 600 Super Credits before Arrowhead gave it away for free.
In response, Pilestedt argues: “Weapons are what weapons are, balance doesn’t matter. This is also what was wrong before. Things were seen as game objects rather than real weapons. If you like the [Killzone] fantasy, you may want to use it. It kills things, not useless. It could maybe use some tweaking, but unfortunately a three burst sniper with nine rounds per mag… isn’t that great. But that’s how the weapon works.”
To be charitable, much of the community’s past outrage has been at Arrowhead being anti-fun and too balance-focused with its number tweaking—in Pilestedt’s own words, “every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed”. Besides, it’s only normal that, in a game which releases a batch of weapons every Warbond (for a combined pace of around 12 new weapons every three to five months) you’re gonna have a hard time keeping things on an even keel.
Helldivers 2 is also a co-op game, not a PvP arena—so things like power fantasy, general feel, and baseline effectiveness are going to matter way more than a vague definition of fairness. However, simply shrugging at an underdog gun and saying “that’s how the weapon works” in Killzone seems baffling, considering Helldivers 2 owes its recent success to uplifting its underperforming weapons, more than anything. Sure, it’d defeat the exercise of adding Killzone weapons if they didn’t work like they do in that game, but I feel like that’s a secondary concern compared to making it worth the price in Helldivers 2.
It may just boil down to verisimilitude (the feeling of ‘realness’) for Pilestedt, who adds: “I really despise the trope that snipers in games do more damage than rifles of the same caliber,” Pilestedt adds. “It’s so dumb.” This tracks with a later comment in a separate thread where he laments the videogame logic of miniguns heating up the more you use them, something the design of miniguns is literally built around avoiding. “Any designer that designs miniguns that way should not work making shooters.”
At the same time, this is a game where you’re shooting aliens with plasma guns and mowing down giant insects with flamethrowers, realism only gets you so far. Gag weapons like the 2124 Constitution rifle are one thing, but this is a weapon that would’ve cost actual premium currency as part of a crossover event.
Disagreeing with how that game handled its gun design doesn’t track as an excuse to make it wimpy when you’d planned to sell it for around $6 in premium currency—the only reason players aren’t demanding their Super Credits back in droves is because Arrowhead changed its mind, and gave it away for free. I’d say the studio dodged a bullet, here, and it’d be good to study why that shot was fired in the first place.
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Kurt Indovina
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