Transmission from the Game Director: Progressing Progression

Greetings Helldivers, 

This week we're passing the keyboard to our game director, Mikael Eriksson, to chat about the near future of progression in Helldivers 2. Spoiler alert - changes to both Community and Personal progression are inbound!

Hello,

Today there's a lot to talk about, but let's start by talking about progression, and why it's not progressing faster.

The way we see it, there's two broad categories of progression in our game: Community Progression, which is the community journey and contribution to the Galactic War, and Player Progression, which is your personal journey, and contribution and impact on the war development. Both are very important to us and I want to share some of the development work taking place on these systems.

We have consistently received feedback around our endgame progression plans, with players asking about level cap increases and additional ship modules. Simply put: we feel like previously seen progression elements, like raising the level cap in silo, aren’t enough and wouldn't address your feedback on a foundational level. We are going to raise the level cap, but ideally, when we deepen the progression, we want there to be more valuable upgrades for every kind of player–not just our players who have unlocked 100% of all the offerings.

Let's start with Community Progression.

Some of the most epic moments in this game have been when the community worked together to achieve common goals ("send more dudes!"). Everything from earning cool rewards to shaping the lore of the universe like unlocking the Exosuit, saving the children, or holding the line against the Illuminates on Calypso. However, we want to do more to improve how players interact with the Galactic War, collaborate as a community, and receive rewards.

For example, it's never been clear if the actions of the community actually lead to different outcomes, or if it's all just smoke and mirrors.The reality is that the community impact on the Galactic War differs, but even in the cases where we did a lot of work to prepare for very different outcomes, we've struggled to communicate it in the game

Additionally, unless you joined right at the start of a big event like the Battle for Super Earth or the Cyberstan Invasion, it's been difficult to understand what's going on. Even if that can be funny sometimes, ("... all I know is that I must kill!"), it was never intended to be confusing for players. 

For those and other reasons, we are launching Galactic War Campaigns in June. In a nutshell, Campaigns are the next evolution of Major Orders. They will be roughly 1-3 weeks in length with the intention that it will always be clear what the active Campaign is, how it's going, what the outcomes have been, and what's at stake.

In more exciting news: the other thing we heard is that players like to EARN more rewards, so the introduction of Campaigns means there will always be at least one Campaign reward if the conditions are met. We want to make these rewards special, because we also think players should earn more than just medals. We’ll experiment with different rewards, ranging from gameplay altering effects to cool items, and alongside you, we'll keep playing with this over the coming months and see what you think. It also means there is more stuff for players to work towards outside of warbonds. Pray J.O.E.L is feeling generous, the first reward you’ll be working to unlock is a new FRV!

Looking a bit further into the future, I want to talk about Planet Warfronts.

Before we launched the game, we experimented with dynamic warfronts on planets, where players needed to make strategic community decisions on a planet level in order to liberate it. While it was promising, we realized we didn't have the content needed to do it justice at the time. We feel we've now added enough content to realize the vision we had for Planet Warfronts, and it's going to be the next big thing we're working towards in the Galactic War. When you've seen Johan talk about experimenting with roguelite systems, he was referring to this.

When we introduce Planet Warfronts, missions will be grouped under different categories: 

• "Defend" missions in liberated territory

• "Frontline War" missions on the frontlines 

• "Behind Enemy Lines" missions in enemy controlled territory

Players will fight to reach key strategic locations on planets, like cities, which can have different active enemy variants in different areas of the planet. Of course, you’ll still have the Game Masters to contend with, too. In the final version of this feature, there will also be gameplay altering effects and consequences for achieving planet liberation goals, like reaching and liberating a city within X time or disabling enemy artillery in one location to unlock crucial Operations. The intention is to make it more fun to liberate planets with your squad and deepen the Galactic War and Community Progression systems. We want liberating planets to feel unique and epic for everyone. We have some development and design work ahead to make these feel great and provide the best experience, but I wanted to share just one of the ideas we have in active development. More to come on these changes in the next few months!

Alright, but what about Player Progression?

As Game Director, it's important to me to make sure our players' personal motivations to play Helldivers 2 aren't in conflict with the goals of both their immediate squad or the community as a whole. For example, if you had a goal to kill 100 Bile Titans, and your squad didn't, you might be inclined to go, "Sorry guys, I've got medals to earn. Leeeerooooy!" I feel that Personal Orders have run into this issue many times, so we are transforming that system into "Personal Campaign Progression." The intent is for every Galactic War Campaign to come with a personal progression reward track. That way, even if the community fails to reach a larger goal, players can still do their part toward their personal goals and get rewarded with cool things to mark their participation in various Campaigns. This change won't happen with the launch of Galactic War Campaigns, but we are planning to deploy it this year.

Lastly, let's talk about ships! We’re bringing two big changes to your Super Destroyers: we are extending gameplay progression and adding customization to make every ship unique.

Upgrading your ship will be the most exciting for players early on in their Helldivers 2 journey, but we also have some plans for the long term. An area that isn't really living up to its potential is the ship module system: right now, players have the same progression path, with very little agency or ability to adapt to different playstyles. And even if you've unlocked all the ship modules, your ships don't really look that different or feel personalized in any way.

For that reason and more, we're working on an overhaul of the ship module system that will change how this works, by adding more player agency and significantly increasing the offerings for players to progress. Not only that, we're also adding more ships! The biggest shift we've done internally is we now have a dedicated ship team, working on the first new ship. Our intention is that each new ship will have their own unique progression paths, specializations and customizations. And if you like the ships, we want to keep adding them; at least the ones we've planned so far!

I can't share when the new ship can reach your hands... yet, but I'll be sharing more details later this year for certain. 

One last thing I can share is a list of some upcoming fixes that we also hope will improve your experience in Helldivers 2. 

You can expect to see these changes very soon:

• Helldivers will be able to use assisted reload, as long as either the carrier or the reloader of the weapon have the corresponding backpack.

• More emotes! Helldivers will have 8 emote slots instead of 4.

• Reducing dead input on stimming.

And coming a bit further down the line, we’re tackling

• Stratagem bouncing. We've assembled a task force to prototype fixes for this issue and we're hoping to have it solved by the end of the year.

• Hellpod steering. Similar to stratagem bouncing, we're also tackling this long standing issue.

• Improving enemy and player traversal, which includes environmental collision and reducing movement penalties on grass and vegetation.

• Increasing the level cap to 300

• Economy and resource improvements

• Fixes to the Warbond and Superstore menus that make them easier to navigate.

• Closed beta testing that focuses on stability and balancing, and that includes getting beta test feedback from our Propaganda Commanders.

While this is not an exhaustive list of everything we're planning, I hope it gives you some insight into what's coming up next for Progression, and some of the reasoning behind the path we've chosen. I can't wait to hear and read what you think, and to get this into your hands. 

See you on the battlefield,

Mikael
Game Director