The community is reacting negatively to Arrowhead Game Studios, the developer of Helldivers 2, for nerfing fire damage weapons just days before the release of Freedom’s Flame, a premium war bond with a pyromaniac theme.
This week’s Escalation of Freedom update brought balance modifications, including several adjustments to the fire damage mechanism of the game to make flame-spewing weaponry act “more realistically.”
Social media has been used by some irate community members to voice their displeasure about the update’s drastic nerfing of fire-based weapons like the flamethrower, which was before seen to be a powerful countermeasure against armored determined charges.
Within a few days, the recent review score of Helldivers 2 on Steam went from “mainly good” to “mixed” due to almost 2,000 negative reviews. Some others vented on social media over what they saw as the developer’s nerf-happy approach to weapon balancing.
Assuring players on Discord that developers had “heard your feedback” regarding fire damage, community manager Baskinator of Arrowhead recognized the outcry and said the company was now “having a lot of internal conversations about the best course of action.”
After that, Studio CEO Shams Jorjani stated on X/Twitter that while “other things require time to fry a bit longer,” a hotfix that will “concentrate on bugs, and might include some balancing tweaks,” will be released “at some point.”
Arrowhead has previously experienced the raging fires of community uprisings. The director of Helldivers 2, Johan Pilestedt, stated in May that “every time someone finds anything fun, the fun is eliminated,” implying that the team had been overly enthusiastic with its nerf-laden releases.
A popular policy that would have required PC gamers to have a PSN account to play the online cooperative shooter was also met with widespread opposition earlier this year by the player base, which ultimately forced the entertainment giant to scrap the idea completely.
