Arrowhead CEO Responds to Helldivers 2 Community Backlash Over Weapon Nerfing

Helldivers 2 has been hit with a (new) wave of negative reviews recently over changes made in the latest Escalation of Freedom update, the game's largest ever update. Although the review bombing isn't as severe as the one that occurred three months ago, the game has still received almost 3,000 negative reviews in the past three days.

The update brought new content and made significant balance changes to weapons and stratagems, aiming to make the game's fire damage system more "realistic." However, despite Arrowhead provided a detailed explanation for their motivation, these changes, in essence, "nerfs", haven't sat well with the player base.

Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani took to the Helldivers Discord to express his views on the matter:

So, it seems the viewpoint here is that players caring enough about the game to react to changes and such feedback is essential for the development team to understand player likes and dislikes, though this method might bring some pain to players as well as to the game itself. 

Jorjani addressed the situation further on Twitter, saying, "We have a lot of discussions going on internally at the studio as we evaluate this update and plan ahead." Regarding a player query on how long the evaluation process would take, Shams explained:

We'll need to wait for further action from Arrowhead to see what they are really going to do with this round of community backlash. Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.