Helldivers 2 balancing has been "removing the fun", Arrowhead CEO frets - "just tweaking damage numbers is a blunt tool"

rockpapershotgun.com:

I spent this morning being pseudo-profound about Animal Well and pseudo-elegaic about Tango Gameworks, so now it's time to get back to the Real Business - being a pseud on the subject of videogame gun balancing.

The game in question is cheery co-op shooter Helldivers 2, over which Aunty Sony recently upended a can of furious worms by abruptly insisting that Steam players have a PSN account for security reasons and so, blocking players in regions where PSN isn't available. Sony have subsequently walked back the requirement following a backlash of truly hellish proportions, though I understand that the game remains unavailable on Steam in certain regions. By comparison, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt's remarks overnight that the developers might have been "removing the fun" with their gun balancing seems pretty innocuous.

"Hey, yeah i think we've gone too far in some areas," Pilestedt told a Xitter user yesterday. "Will talk to the team about the approach to balance. It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed." He added in the subsequent thread that Arrowhead have done "a bit too much balancing using damage as well instead of other measures such as recoil, reload speeds, accuracy, projectile speeds and equip speeds. Just tweaking damage numbers is a blunt tool."

In particular, Pilestedt suggested that the game's heavy machinegun could do with a more substantial rework, observing that "I think the HMG needs a tripod with an ammo box that it can be mounted on as part of team play mechanics. ...but it's a bit too ambitious as a balance adjustment". Elsewhere, he defended a few of Arrowhead's more contentious balancing adjustments, commenting that the game's railgun was "way OP" next to the recoilless rifle and EAT-17 anti-tank stratagems.

Arrowhead have been pretty upfront about the process of balancing Helldivers 2's arsenal, with individual developers dipping into threads and sometimes getting themselves into hot water. In a blog from