Raises hand: I hear what you are saying. I even agree when it is with players you don't know, however, teamwork with guys you know can make a Helldive feel easy. Teamwork is there if you want it.
This is an interesting point, as Helldivers also has a solo option if you want it. That as a core possibility radically limits ways to do teamwork. It will always be optional to work as a team because it will always be optional to play co-op. Similar to Helldive, it becomes easier as co-op, but its not required. The onyl real "co-op lever" the devs have is difficulty, and even that adapts to solo play slightly.
@@leegofilmsit doesn't really have solo though, as AH has made it clear with game design and repeatedly in patch notes that they don't want us to play solo. They don't want one player to be able to handle everything, and they don't want hard difficulties to be easy. They interpret those two priorities as meaning it's necessary to make it harder and less convenient to play solo than to play with a group
A team does make certain things easier, due to the fact you’ve got an extra 3 guns in the area. Concentrating firepower does make an impact, especially when the game decides to play unfairly and drop army on your head :)
@G1beonGames I think it goes beyond concentrated firepower. A perfect example is orbital lasers on a bunker mission. You call out your throws as to not waste a stratagem. A good team is like clockwork, each hand does its part to run smoothly.
@@G1beonGamesit‘s also notable that hulks/chargers being easier to damage (heatsink/bilesack) when not facing the player (and tanks aswell, to a degree) and suppression fire aid this. you and bots become less accurate when receiving damage, so a buddy providing covering fire is really helpful and more suppressio. fire taking place reduces damage taken because the enemies are not only eliminated quicker, but also hit less often
In high levels it is encouraged to split in 2 and 2. The need for a buddy is because the game is brutal and mistakes are heavy punished, and you will make mistakes. A buddy helps with respawning at your old spot. The reward for players is not killing stuff then extracting, it is samples and other items you can pick up and extract with. Having a buddy cuts down the time of running around to recover lost item. Yes, if the players are extremely good at what they are doing then there is little need for a buddy. But those are extreme scenarios and any implementation will have extreme scenarios that the implementation cannot cover.
Right on! The design can't account for the extremes. The 2 and 2 split is a great compromise at higher levels, it may not be what Arrowhead was marketing but it goes a long way to strengthen the aesthetic of teamwork.
I am annoyed when all three team mates are hellbent on following me. Since bot drops and bug breaches can only happen once every X minutes depending on difficulty (and Localized Confusion), it encourages splitting up. The ideal situation is a person running to points of interests triggers one, then the other three split up and do main/side objectives with little resistance. Calling out when it happens and knowing when the next time enemies can reinforce can give team mates focusing on objectives more confidence, especially when going after already heavily defended enemy territory.
@@alexanderrobins7497 True but that is a tactic that I personally do not like because it usually ends up in sacrificing that one that triggered reinforcements. Also it is easy to make a mistake and the reinforcements to be triggered by the one responsible in getting samples. In my opinion the scenario you described falls into "extreme scenarios". You either very good at what you are doing or are playing intentionally on low difficulty, much lower then what you are capable.
Yeah I just abandon the team (as lead) if I end up in a team where everyone just splits off doing their own thing completely. Pairs is understandable. But some people join groups to play alone - I think they're lost, so I send them back to where they want to be.
Deep Rock Galactic would be an interesting comparison. In DRG the map is designed to keep the team together as the team is pushed through a cave that can have tight passage ways. Additionally, the characters have certain restrictions like engineer finding it hard to reach his own platforms up high, whilst the scout benefits from having something to stand on. In Helldivers 2, Maps are open and do not push the team together. Additionally folk do not wish to restrict themselves in one aspect to gain an advantage in another, like restricted themselves from fighting certain enemies to demolish others, as people cannot rely on other players to cover their weaknesses, especially randoms.
I'll put it on the list. That's actually really interesting how the design of the game world influences player cooperation. I'm not too familiar with Deep Rock Galactic, but I've been meaning to look into. Thank you for the suggestion :)
@@G1beonGamesgo play DRG, the whole thing is a great design on how to make your teammates work together. I'm surprised that Helldivers doesn't have any grapple type enemies that requires a teammate to free you from, L4D2 proved that it was a good way to incentivise sticking together(along with their map design)
DRG also doesn't punish you for using certain weapons, i.e. being either unable to kill an enemy or requiring you to waste a huge amount of ammo to do so.
Another thing encouraging splitting up is bot drops/ bug breaches. If a dibe clearing a light or medium nest/outpost triggers one, that substantially reduces the risk other players take when completing higher priority objectives, given that they are aome distance from the breach/drop
I have noticed this too, even on Helldive people may loosely stick together (or not, splitting up is common) but you don't really interact with your teammates. You mostly just exist near each other, shoot in the same general direction, and reinforce when someone dies. In contrast, in let's say Deep Rock Galactic you often see teamwork between randoms, like Engineer placing platforms for Scout, Driller freezing an enemy and Gunner taking it out etc. There's multiple core issues here imo: The game doesn't encourage specialization, instead the best practice is for everyone to run a generalist loadout where you can deal with everything, and there aren't enough (perceived) penalties for splitting up and not enough rewards for staying together.
Cool vid essay and well made, I have to say the intro is the complete opposite of my experience. I play with randoms all the time and have no trouble working with them on when and where Resupplies are called, which enemy position is the priority, and getting two people in one place to open a bunker. If there's a problem with teamwork, it's that everyone tries to run a "jack of all trades" loadout since getting separated from your stuff is a common occurrence, especially when joining midgame into a shitshow. No one wants to be the "anti heavy" guy surrounded by chaff, or the jumppack scout pinned down by Hulks, so we all try to come prepared for anything. That one behavior in its own right encourages players to go off on their own and try to do everything themselves, because that's what they designed their loadout to do.... it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you design your loadout around working with your team, and then actually stick with them, you'll find people like to work together on almost any task and you'll make friends everywhere you go.
It ain't Left4Dead2 level of teamwork. But, with the right squad and right Helldiver. You'd have a lot of fun. While still goofing about without being shouted at by a dude from Maxico. Or Latino. Or Chinese. Or German. And maybe Aussies, but those guys are the best to be with. Especially my friend Josh, who is a fricking madlad of a Aussie Helldiver.
@@G1beonGames Helldivers 2 would be a completely different experience if there are regular enemies that can pin down and disable a player with a single attack out of nowhere like Hunters or Smokers in Left 4 Dead. The closest thing to it is the Stalkers that can ragdoll players, but ragdolls are temporary and can be escaped from and Stalkers only spawn in some areas anyway.
@ArifRWinandar Yeah, pinning enemies will be troublesome in a game like Helldiver. The reason why L4D did it better is because of its three AI-teammate and the map layout. In Helldivers, if added pinning enemies, it's basically a death sentence because there's no one there to help you. And it will get really annoying real fast.
I'd say that the effectiveness of Reinforce is down to a player's level of experience in the game. The more experienced someone is, the less likely they are to die. Therefore, having a buddy to reinforce you is not entirely necessary. Even the most experienced players still die sometimes, but I have personally found that to be a minor setback.
@@G1beonGames You could argue that for left4deads system, to some degree. A really skilled player can just shoot the special infected before getting grabbed. But that game doesnt have easy respawning so the risk is not generally worth it.
Lol if only more people realized that I want to be rezzed at (or as close as possible) to my corpse. Respawn etiquette is still hit or miss unfortunately. I wonder about the consequences of shrinking the mission reinforcement budget for the playerbase... 20 extra guys for a team of 4 is a lot.
Your experience is very different then mine. When i play the team is usually in one big group working together or breaking into pairs and working together. But the design still gives space for people to go if on their own if they want or if necessary to complete something. I feel team work opportunities are still there and if you do too much to force it, you are reducing the design of the game and making people play a certain way.
Right. The video seems to think that teamwork means that all 4 players are grouped together working on the same thing at all times, and that's not always the case - sometimes, having one player working alone or splitting the squad into pairs is a form of team coordination. Sometimes, it's strategic to peel off a player to deal with a small side objective while the larger team deals with something bigger - you don't need the entire team to be tied up with running super samples back to extract, or taking out an unauthorized broadcast, spore tower, or Shrieker nest (where a few whacks from a single 'diver with a quasar cannon at range will get the job done), for example. This is especially true on the 12-minute blitz missions, where you might need to split into teams if you want to get everything done (especially if the map happens to have something time-consuming like SEAF Artillery as a secondary).
@@ASFalcon13 I acknowledge that teamwork isn't always about grouping up in one location. As you said, sometimes splitting the group in the best choice in the moment. I prefer it this way. (I might not have made that clear in the conclusion) However, I'd argue Arrowhead's definition of teamwork is more like the 4 man group working shoulder to shoulder. The marketing, interviews, and promotional images. They all show this kind of teamwork. Which creates a dichotomy that I wanted to explore in the video. But I fully agree with what you're saying, sticking together isn't always the best idea and not always the case.
On the part where you mention that there isn't a benefit of being together, there actually is. If you play on Helldive, you get way more enemies to deal with if they drop/breach. I can survive it alone and beat it, but it takes time, with a team? Well, those drops/breaches become way quicker, making it easy to actually get to said objective. I like to believe that the lower difficulties are there just to teach you the mechanics, Helldive is where you put that into combination with your teammates.
You kept mentioning that there's no buddy mechanics. I'd love to hear what that might look like within the confines of the current game, 3rd person and all. Off the top of my head, being able to share ammo, vehicles (being limited to 1 or 2) which have no offensive abilities without another Hell Diver, & maybe (as you mentioned) having some effect on the speed, or even, complexity of objective completion with more Divers on it. I'm right there with you that the buddy reloads should be pulling from the shooters pack. It just makes sense, though it could cause wonkieness with drone packs of the loader where I could see the shooter catching some DMG, maybe even a death.
I think vehicles would be a good move as well, maybe put those as one of those stratagems that wen automatically get in all missions rather than having to have someone equip it like a mech.
ThiccfilA had a recent podcast (posted on UA-cam) and one of the guests mentioned that teamloading would be too powerful if it didnt require the backback. Apparently its a really powerful mechanic if your team sticks close together. I imagine having 2 people sticking together with AT and supply pack would be able to delete massive amounts of heavy enemies very quickly, possibly making the “too many chargers” patch very manageable. Put the supply pack on a 3rd teammate and have the loader use the Autocannon so they can switch from teamloading AT to teamloading anti-mediums… I can easily see that team taking out difficulties beyond Helldive.
As far as I'm aware, sticking close together does actually reduce enemy patrol(?) spawns. Of course, this mechanic isn't obvious from in-game info, but I want to point it out as one of the few mechanics that encourages staying close (for those who know about it.) Also, I guess resupplies might encourage sticking together. Not very strong options, but it's something.
The problem with this mechanic of introducing more patrol spawns for split players is that your other teammates are very unlikely to experience any added trouble, especially if they are on the far side of the map. If anything that makes it more worthwhile for players to split up and go far away from each other so our patrols don't interfere with another player's work. So our options are either to work as a team close together or to be as far apart from each other as possible. Unfortunately more skilled players do not need to be near their other teammates to contribute so they'll be the first ones to run off by themselves.
This is true, sticking together will reduce the spawns of enemy patrols. And resupply is very helpful to have and share. Unfortunately, they're just not prominent enough to keep the team together. Experienced players can easily handle these added challenges.
Yeah but for those of us that run at 7+ as our standard we are generally perfectly capable of handling many, many spawns simultaneously totally solo, especially against the bugs, and frankly this is the only way to make the bugs really challenging. It's a combination of kiting, close air support, and stealth. Playing as a blob gets boring fast for me, outside of final extraction I rarely want more than one other player anywhere near me.
It wasnt sticking together that reduces patrols it was Solo players patrols were increased and as players join the mission patrol decrease wich I beleive is now no longer a thing in the recent patch
Take this wisdom to heart. If players don't want to work as a team, they will not, no matter how many game mechanics are baked in to encourage teamwork.
@@medievalknyght313 in Left 4 Dead teamwork is not encouraged, it's mandatory. Anyone who strays from the group will be dead in an instant unless rescued by other players.
I think the game strives as a good middle ground between needing tons of cohesion between players and allowing player freedom during missions. Some players simply don’t want to work as part of a team. It takes effort, coordination, patience, and a different set of skills than being a lone wolf. The game allows both playstyles to thrive, and as a result, I’ve noticed that most missions hit this middle ground between necessary cooperation and splitting up to cover objectives. There’s a lot of things not mentioned in this video that contribute to the game being even more team-oriented than games like DRG.
When people complained about it being near impossible at certain times to solo level 9 missions [in a team oriented game] I just laughed at them, and I still do, but we definitely should be looking more into how to fix team mechanics. For assisted reload it really is as simple as making it so 1. You are not getting kicked off the assisted reload constantly every time a pebble gets in your way, and 2. making it so the assister uses the assisted's backpack instead of their own. First one will be hard to implement but the second one is the main thing. Not being encouraged to stick together for objectives in normal missions is true, and I think that the defense missions are fairly good about encouraging teamwork, but they have their problems. 1. Practically or sometimes actually 0 samples in defense missions. If you want to play the MO defending a planet, you have to sacrifice your ability to progress in getting samples to upgrade ship modules. This is why I refuse to play any defense missions at all unless I am trying a new strategem only available on that planet, such as the commando. A new player cannot play a defense mission or else they are actively hindering their progress. 2. Currently, the launch 8 rockets mission is not possible in level 9's, unless you get some majorly good RNG. Right now, they are spawning Bile Titans and Factory Striders directly on top of the objective, meaning if you even attempt to play it, you will eventually lose about 4 rockets in due to something completely unavoidable, creating a frustrating experience. These 2 things combined means that as a player who has not 100% the game, you have no incentive to play the only team focused missions, and one of which will just screw you over whether or not you play right. We have the ability to ping, we have the ability to hold that button for our characters to talk, we need to be able to hold the button for custom pings. Its hard to tell who is talking when someone uses that feature, if you set a ping labeled [I need assistance] then people would know exactly where to go to help their teammates. Or even making it so you can do a self-ping that says "Team Reload Request" would be great with the team reload changes. Just spitballing a few ideas. Weapons are too powerful. I do not necessarily think this should be altered, but as is the weapon combinations we have as players with over 30-40 hours in the game are powerful enough to easily solo a level 9 bot or bug mission. Problem is, this cannot be fixed without severely dividing and killing the community. The game was far too easy when it launched, and as its gone on its gotten harder, and most of the community has disliked it becoming harder. They have had it easy for long enough now that if the game becomes hard enough to incentivize teamwork, even if all my changes were implemented, people would still be enraged. A weird one, but I personally feel teamwork can't work because after the PSN linking controversy, a large portion of the community still playing are idiots. I am not saying its bad to have people who are not very smart, but if we are trying to play team oriented, you will get tired of playing if your teammates are just clueless. We lost a huge lot of people across many countries due to them still being banned, and many smart people such as PirateSoftware are not playing the game until the ban is lifted. What is left is a community of people who have not gotten good enough to feel bored, and these are the main ones that make their lobbies public or drop SOS beacons, so they are taking up the majority of public games. Lots of the good players who are smart and good enough to play team oriented only play intermittently or just solo, partly because of getting bored, having lives, and public games are riddled with teamkillers and if you choose to join others games, will often kick you for doing something that slightly pissed them off.
Another great video essay. I think a good stopgap to address the teamwork issue is implementing more “hard” teamwork systems. Namely, the release of the APC and tanks, which will require multiple players to use efficiently compared to a single support weapon package.
yeah this game actually makes it easier to go solo rather than being on a team, like its easier to stick togheter to have fun and do some obectives but if we really want to do everything on the map its just better to split up and not engage with anything. And more with the automatons where they are easier to deal with
The only thing that absolutely requires team play are the bunker doors. Most of the time I'm by myself when I find one, so I just have to leave it behind knowing there could be two stacks of super credits inside.
Honestly when I first learned of assisted reload I expected to be able to reload my buddy using the backpack on their back. In universe what's the difference between taking it from my back or theirs? Heck, it'ss probably easier to reach left or right than over and backwards.
It was meant to mirror real life military units where one guy carries the weapon and the other carries the ammunition, but I agree that we should be able to assist reload anytime we want
The key difference is in the recoil of weapons like the Spear or Recoilless Rifle, because to get to their ammo more efficiently you'd be in the back of the line of fire. Imagine getting a concussion every time your buddy tried to fire the weapon you were reloading, and getting knocked back because of the blast.
The game logic should be that the assisted reload comes from the firing backpack unless the helldiver giving the assisted reload has a backpack with compatible ammo, which then takes it from the assistor's back pack. Rational, I often get a backpack from my spear using friend. I am extra ammo and a reload speed buff. If only the one firing the weapon has ammo used, then we would have to do a backpack swap instead of me just going off to destroy non-heavy enemies. Additionally it also opens up possible gameplay where a backpack support weapon which does not usually need to fire often could not be the one carrying a backpack and just needs a mere moment of time from the designated loader to be combat operational again.
@@segevkrespi8609real life: accurate game: clunky and annoying, real life is usually a lot more planned out especially in military terms. In this game world, you are heavily restricted in what you can actually bring/should bring. At the very least, assisted reload should drain from the shooter's backpack first. And THEN feed from the assistant
Assistant reload can be really good with extracting like the recoilless rifle can easily take down bigger bugs that could cause a problem if you took too long with reloading
I am a helldiver that actually enjoys the team reloading mechanics, that being said the backpack is its Achilles' heel. But its more than faster reloading for the fight but the increasing damage output of the pair. Sure one player forfeiting their dps for their partner may sound silly, but when you are emptying an ENTIRE Autocannon pack into a wave of endless bots you think differently.
Here are some ideas: add enemies that pin you down, similar to the special infected in Left 4 Dead, requiring someone or something to kill it or knock it off of you to free you. While this wouldn't force players to stick together, it would make it a heck of a lot smarter to at least go in pairs. Probably a better idea to keep these enemies out of solo play, and make them more common as the squad gets bigger Increase the time limit on harder difficulties. It's so easy to get bogged down into a loop of reinforcement call-ins with no way out, especially when detector towers are involved. I think that the breach/drop system needs reworking in general, but that's a topic for another day Add more objectives that take longer to complete without your squad present. For example: multiple divers logging into a terminal and standing nearby can increase how quickly data gets transferred, or manually hold open some valves to fuel an ICBM faster. However, this shouldn't harm solo players (since your whole squad crashing at once is still a serious issue)
The game already has several cheap ways of killing players, rockets and stun locking bug attacks being the main things. Players have universally despised these, and the devs have made repeated efforts to make them less cheap (rocket damage models were improved to prevent insta death, helmets with heavy armor offer more protection, stun intensity and duration have been improved). Adding this in would be a very unwelcome change. I agree with point 2 I also agree with part 3
Timer is definitely too short on hard missions with low timers. 12minutes to (ideally) destroy all the fabs, grab all the samples, AND extract (probably without air support by then)
Ok now this was a really good video, touching on game design always shows how subtly fundamental it is, and how wonky a game can get terribly wonky when that one thing is done in a way that clashes with other elements. Thank you for pointing this out!
I'll come over this with a slightly different perspective. Context: my country does mandatory military training and we're separated to 3 main parts; Army, Police and Civil Defence. So im prefacing this with a bit of knowledge in how military teams work as compared to civil ones. Basically, military strike teams have roles attached to them. Someone is the overwatch, others can be the breach while some will be vanguard. Everyone is trained similarly at the foundations, you get to use different weapons and get details on each type with its pros and cons. But ultimately, you are assigned a role so that the operation runs smoothly and without much overlap (which causes wasted time and effort). However, contingency plans are laid out in which someone else will have to cover a different role if one of your team is down. Even so, most of the time, strike teams are so good at what they do that the contingency plans remain redundancy, as it should. Coming back to HD2, its obvious why the game mechanics stayed as that, they are based in terms of real life military teams. If someone is on the console, someone else is the overwatch, someone else is on the variable obj, etc. And this can be switched around seamlessly. The idea here is CHOICE. You can choose to play with others but you can also play solo. While i agree with your point in team reload and different game perspective, id say the game mechanics itself leans more towards communicative teamwork, which HD2 has lots of. From VC to pinging things on the map. But therein lies the whole point; its a CHOICE. Had the devs executed strict roles like classes (although i would love to have these in the game) or weapon limitations, the game wouldnt have burst into the scene as it is. Imagine needing to have a heavy gunner only for the last guy to choose a light armored scout. In a game with friendly fire? That will just upped the griefing. Hence why the openness of the game mechanics itself.
Man your videos are so good, and your animations are funny, I have no idea how after getting mulitple 10K plus views on a video you still have under a thousand subs. CMON PEOPLE SUB ALREADY!
The joke about the Oil Refinery valves not counting is really spot on. Too many of the mission objectives we have to deal with can be solved by 1 player. That's not to say that every objective needs to have 2 players (the "bunker door" option), but turning a valve takes only a couple seconds compared to say, a full on second terminal with its own puzzles to solve. In fact the only reason why many of these objectives could possibly need a second or third player to help out is when there are enemies nearby shooting at you. If I am the one being shot at then my ally who has been largely ignored can (relatively) safely complete the objectives. But the moment that the fighting is over it's usually better for my allies to move on to other parts of the mission while I stay behind to finish off the remaining tasks. The only real counterpoint to this is the Geological Survey missions because of the forced bug breaches and bot drops, but with enough patience and cover both of those can be handled solo. Just the other day I was doing the Nuke Hatcheries mission and went off to solo one of the main objectives while my entire team handled the last one. Even though I spent most of my time running away from the terminids, I was still able to solo the defense phase of the drill tasks before I died. Even worse, my teammates weren't able to 3-man their own objective and ran away from it to give me a hand, but by then I had taken out enough of the bugs that I was able to run straight to the drill and tell it to detonate. The only time I needed my team at that point was when I had died, but that was well after the arming time so I hadn't actually lost any progress, and I didn't even need them to help me shoot my way to the terminal because I had killed or lured away the most challenging leftovers before I had died.
Spot on! The only real benefit for a team to be in one place is to deal with the enemies, but with some patience and practice, that benefit is not needed. It's great to have them there, but not necessary.
@@G1beonGames That's why in my mind Deep Rock Galactic is a better cooperative game. Then again, DRG can get away without a top-down camera angle because of the confined spaces inside the asteroid.
I bring up DRG as well. One thing to note about DRG community is that while it's NOW friendly and cooperative bunch of players, it was a "game culture" cultivated over years. Early DRG had a lot of solo minded players, but the design of the game, the charm of it and slow but steady collective thought of "No dwarf left behind" made the community what it was today. Probably only game where I can join up with randoms 99% of the time and have helluva good teamwork right off the bat. Hellidvers 2 community is still young and full of soloists and people unwilling to cooperate or even communicate. But there are seeds of DRG-like community. I been in several missions where no diver was left behind, they were reinforced back on the field so they can get to a shuttle. Sure, Helldivers 2' design isn't singposting for cooperation like DRG is. Heck, I like the fact that splitting up IS effective strategy and when a team of divers come together to cooperate, grab stratagems and primaries to supplement each other, stick to their fire duties... It's beautiful to experience.
I love clearing a Helldive map with a team of four solid divers able to quickly and independently clear out objectives all over the map simultaneously. We might be hundreds of meters apart but we are still working as a team to complete the objective and side objectives, all on the same map. Extraction is where the team comes back together.
I've understood that from the first minute, there are a lot of cuts, very short clips that rapidly change, pretty much that when it changes your brain goes "OOOH NEW SCENE!" so you just get attracted, that's where a lot of retention comes in. The thumbnail, it's eye-catching, it also increases curiosity, like "what is the dichotomy of teamwork in helldivers?", it catch's more CTR. The opener? I guess you can it that. It's a funny moment, then the rising music in the background. It also talking very slightly on what Helldivers 2 even is, with a slight bit of comedic effect. (and there more im just too demotivated)
I think one area that AH did well in encouraging teamwork is the weapon loadout choices. For example, me and a buddy of mine always cheese Helldive difficulty terminids by me bringing a fire only loadout for crowd control (flamethrower, napalm, and supply pack with incendiaries), and he brings the quasar, rail cannon, and 500 KG for the titans and charger. The recent major balancing patch reinforced planning around loadouts with your teammates since it’s no longer ONLY just everyone bringing only AT weapons for the old ridiculous titan and charger spam, but rather one or two focusing on titans and the others planning to cover each others weakness with dealing with the massive hordes of hunters and shriekers that attack you now on Helldive difficulty. Thank you for mentioning the assistive reload mechanic. I want this mechanic to be viable so badly!
The benefit of teamwork is you double your firepower by having a battle buddy. Having 8 slots of stratagems to mix and match can make an objective really easy since you can deal with any enemy since you have such a wide pool to draw from Alot of the issues in the video can be solved by communicating with your team in lobby and mid mission
Communication is not a guarantee. Communication would solve many of the points I brought up in the video, no argument there. But that requires level of coordination and communication that, from my experience, is rare to encounter.
@@G1beonGames I can almost always communicate with my team (when they are randoms) with marking locations on the mini-map, or tagging a location in line of sight, using the emoticons, and even just typing a few words in chat, and almost always get a response in the form of a thumbs up emote, secondary marking, or just action alone, which has been and is fine by me. Every once in a while, I get an absolute dullard of a team or teammate to cock up everything, but that has been the exception thankfully.
I strongly agree with point 1. Point 2 feels impossible without making a completely different game, which I'm guessing is why you didn't offer any solutions for that issue. Point 3 I have mixed feelings. Co-op objectives only make sense if the second player actually adds fun to the experience, (e.g. most anything from It Takes Two). What I hate are obnoxious barriers to force cooperation such as two-button doors, or, as mentioned in the comments, player X can jump high, player Y can't). In the case of HD2, having a limited pool of stratagems definitely encourages cooperation; but then again, being able to isolate bot drops discourages sticking together. Well made video! You'll definitely be getting more subs in no time!
You're right on the money with point 2! I brought it up only because the change in perspective is the reason players can run off now, because the camera isn't boxing them in. And I totally agree with what you're saying about the mission design. Cooperation should be naturally built into the design, not forced onto the player. After all, that would ruin the fun, and games are supposed to be entertainment. (most of the time anyway)
Allow reloading from either backpack. When you are assisting, allow the character to separate slightly and run/follow and auto re-assist to maintain movement of the player doing the attacking in what is a heavily movement oriented game. Allow the assisting player the ability to call in stratagems without disengageing and use a side arm to fend off nearby units.
Any weapon that comes with a backpack, Recoiless, Spear, Airburst, Autocannon, ect, is a 'team' weapon designed for gunner/loader gameplay. Sure you can one man it but then your reload time is extremely high. Instantaneous reload to basically become a heavy emplacement rivalling the response time of the automated turrets is the benefit of a team weapon. With lower risk of friendly fine since turrets absolutely do NOT check their fire.
@@juminleeI feel like (mainly being the loader and not using the spear often), that the recoilless is even better than the Spear (where you can hold the fire key to immediately fire when ready) for team reload because it can fire as quickly as the reload, without the aim delaying rate of fire. it also works against close enemies, enemies with obstructed line of sight and enemies further than 400m, AND it can actually shoot down dropships effectively because it can shoot immediately (quasar has charge-up time and EAT needs to be picked up or it’s barrel extended when switching to it), and reliably (those only take damage on the engines, meanwhile Spear shoots them in the middle. this fine-tuning also works against bile-titans, of which the head is only hit with the Spear if it’s facing you) the RR fires as fast as the delay between the dropships is on bot drops, allowing the AT team to destroy the entire bot drop single-handedly (including the dropships dropping factory striders, taking only one shot to down it, compared to the many of the Spear, and the Spear being wonky in eg hitting a charger beast three times on the head recently instead of killing it in one, like the recoilless does, makes me wonder what, apart from skill issue, makes people choose the RR over the recoilless) I almost solely play with people I can team reload, like the rate of fire is insane
The game has several mechanics that reward teamwork without forcing it down player's throats. Reinforcements come from teamates, the way spawns work makes things easier to stay together, or at least in pairs, buddy doors, and team weapons are, while under utilized, actually very powerful. Things like the supply pack and complementary loadouts also help too. They did a good job, they don't need to force teamwork, they chose the carrot instead of the stick and it shows. Most teams I play with, even randoms, are more than happy to operate as a group, move on agreed upon objectives, etc.
Helldivers 2 did not fail to emphasize teamwork. The problem has, and always was, the player mentality! Too many players want to play "Who gets the most kills!" Look at all the loadouts, and you'll see a bunch of Eagle and Orbitals galore. You'll see them mark every red ping on the minimap and bee-line straight for them. Right past the main objectives. They're the ones who can't help themselves dropping that last bomb at extraction, just to rack up a few more kills. THIS IS THE PROBLEM! And this is how most players are. Especially pc players. COD is plagued with hackers cheating their way to the highest kill counts and is a prime example of this. No matter what coop game you play, you'll rarely find true coop players as they are small minority. I've played hundreds of missions already as a support role, and I can tell you, I rarely see teams stick together. There's always the killer, the sample hunter, and the completionist. All heading in different directions. I usually follow the guy heading for objectives to help them out. The best games are always the teamwork games. But in the end, you can't force "teamwork" to those who don't give a dam. And that's probably 90% of the players. True coop players are a rare breed, but they're the best.
The problem with the "eagles and orbitals" complaint is that if I am the team's only anti-tank player and I die then suddenly nobody can stop the chargers, bile titans, hulks, or factory striders. It is more practical for every team member to run a little bit of everything in case one of us dies, so we don't lose out on one aspect of firepower. And since you mentioned extraction bombs, I'll add this: I drop bombs at the end of extraction because I like the idea of flying away from explosions like we're in an action movie, thankyouverymuch!
@Keyce0013 I'm not complaining about the strategems, I'm only complaining about something that really can't be fixed. And that's the player mentality. Most players actually carry a bunch of anti-tank stratagems, 500KG being the biggest use. I'm also not entirely complaining against dropping the bombs at extraction. It's to those idiots who drop them recklessly with little to no regard for their teammates' whereabouts. I've gotten killed multiple times from idiots doing this. The worst was one where the player dropped a 330 bomb, which has a huge scatter, gets in the Pelican, and I was over 30 meters away. By the time I reached 5 feet from the Pelican's doors, it killed me. There was literally no reason to drop it. No enemies around. I cussed him out at the end of match. This is the main reason why I try to carry the super samples or majority of samples at the extraction. I'll wait for everyone to board, then I'll enter. If they drop a bomb...well then, they lose everything I was carrying. Lol.
@@Cipher73 As a fellow 380 enjoyer I am so sorry you had to deal with that. I've had my fair share of trying to huck that thing at the enemy's spawn spot only to get knocked down and dropped it at my feet (near extraction). Oops. In terms of the anti-tank thing, that's mostly a practicality problem. It's just not a good idea to leave the anti-tank stratagems to one or two people, because if they are dead you have no means of dealing with a significant threat. I've done this once or twice (usually by accident and not thinking clearly), and it's annoying being chased by an enemy and not being able to do anything about it but run away all the time.
@Keyce0013 no worries about that. The guy who threw it definitely did not drop it, but I highly doubt he knew how big of a scatter that bombardment was. He was reckless with it. In regards to the anti-tank, I think you're just referring to the EATS, Spear, or Recoilless. I was actually just thinking of anything that can kill a bile or walker. And that included all the bombs like Eagle Airstrikes, Orbital Railcannon, 500KG, Orbital Lasers. I pretty much see at least one of these on almost everyone's loadout. Mine are usually Eagle Airstrikes and Autocannon Sentry for all walkers, and Orbital Railcannon/ Autocannon Sentry for Biles and Chargers. I stun Chargers and kill with my HMG when I can. Hulks are easy kills.
@@Cipher73 I consider any stratagem that can take down a charger, BT, hulk, or factory strider to be anti-tank. I typically run around with the autocannon support weapon, but I'll also throw in an Eagle Airstrike, 380/Walking Barrage (for bots), 500kg/Precision Orbital, etc. I might swap to EAT-17s on the tower-defense missions but only because it makes that thing way easier when you can kill an entire group of enemies by shooting them out of the sky. I rarely run with the Spear and never use the Recoilless. If I'm up against chargers I will usually go for whatever support weapon I've got (either AC or HMG), but since I also run the Scorcher as my primary, it can handle 1-2 of them with few issues.
Yeah, outside of assisted reloading the only thing that actually requires a teammate is the bunkers. We had an update that made the Rely Tower side objective more solo friendly but it is nice when there's objectives that have more than one step that's away from a terminal and you have a buddy to do them. What the game needs to promote teamwork is vehicles that require a driver and a gunner, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're never picked because it ends up being better just to run around on foot or if they also give us a bike with guns that a solo person can use.
8:09 "There isn't any benefit gained from multiple team members being present in one location" False. The game spawns fewer enemies when players are grouped together, as the number of patrols dropped onto the map at any given spawn time is based on the number of "player groups" on the map (a group being defined as players within 75m of each other). If all four players are spread apart, you have 4 groups (and 4 patrols spawn); if they're all together, you have only 1 group (and only 1 patrol spawns). You literally benefit from having to face fewer enemies if you're all in one location.
This is mathematically correct but with proper handling is essentially meaningless. If I run off by myself then any patrols that do manage to kill me don't impact your own play performance. As long as I am sufficiently skilled I can either wipe out or avoid any patrols that come my way and still complete more objectives, faster, than my 3 teammates who are all working together.
Right. And, additionally, engaging enemies isn't a free action; you're expending resources anytime you get into a fight. On a good day, you can often remain self-sufficient by hitting minor points of interest along the way. The tables can turn though, and you can suddenly find yourself having to choose between having to disengage and rejoin the group, or calling in the Resupply to extend...but starving the rest of your team in the process.
@@ASFalcon13 I am usually in a good enough position to rarely run out of ammunition, especially since I use the Scorcher which deals a small amount of AoE damage to whatever it hits, so I am almost never dealing 0 damage from deflections. I will also consider using resupply depending on what my teammates are doing. If I am noticing that they are dying a lot, I won't feel as bad because they'll be coming back into the fight with more ammo (or full if using the right booster). Worst case scenario, I run away. I am always cognizant of my map and where nearby patrols are so I am not frequently caught between two pulls.
I don't want to remember those missions in the first place, I have such bad memories of them. Mission Bugs, bot spawn rates, DCs - it's all PTSD. I hate those missions, easily my least favourite by far.
Regarding your thoughts on Mission objectives - I remember reading that both engaging objectives and staying in one place/zone gradually boosts enemy spawnrates. Do you consider this to motivate at least part of your team to stand and protect the "terminal-dude" or how's your reasoning in this case?
You know, I think you're right. There is not a lot that hell diver does for teamwork. but man, when my team of randos works together, helping each other, is the best match of all.
meanwhile an unbeatable strat is one homie bringing Autocannon, and the other brings supply pack, switch backpacks and now you have an auto that reloads 8x faster, has 12x the ammo. and a pocket homie.
Great video - I think your commentary and analysis would be perfect for implementing with randoms. It’s weird, I have either excellent teamwork with randoms and missions that feel easy, or I have missions with randoms where there’s no leadership/direction, and everyone goes off in different directions and it’s more likely people die. I think a lot of that is to do with people prioritising different objectives. Some people are running off getting samples, some people are doing side objectives, some wanna go for a full clear. Maybe a brief voting system while getting fired out the ship in the hellpods as to what you, the player is wanting to prioritise would be a cool idea! Can’t always rely on the text chat, and if you’re like me - I’m too shy and socially awkward to use a mic with people I don’t know! So a voting system would be cool. I think going off in pairs is a really good idea especially when going for a full clear. People have been asking for an easier team reload for months! Feel like it should be an immediate prompt once your team mate with a backpack weapon needs a reload - with an ‘x’ button prompt. Similar to how you can stim.
Also having buffs like ‘morale’ that increase your speed or resilience when you’re within certain meter of a team mate would be cool. If all 4 are together you could get a 4x multiplier for a certain amount of time - which would make extraction more exciting when getting overrun by bots or bugs!!
I think team work is fine for the most part as weapons can be used cooperatively, certain load outs compliment each other and you just generally have a higher survival rate as a group. When you’re not team killing each other anyway. My only teammate issue is when you have players sprinting to every objective leaving aggro enemies in their wake for teammates to wade through.
In brief, IMO: 1. They can't add the buddy system without a compatible backpack, because it'd conflict with stimming/resupplying via supply pack. And programming it would need either a new keybind or a complete overhaul. I'm against hold & toggle, as I feel like it'd pose a hindrance or wouldn't feel like a comfortable option for players. 2. The camera was switched while keeping the same general but significant game mechanics as well as changing your point of teamwork. The most likely solution is a redefinition of the gameplay loop to adjust to the new camera, but legally, people would end up with a completely different game, again. 3. The mission objectives mostly compel you to stay in one place, while the enemies compel you to keep moving, as "you're not supposed to stay, fight and kill everything" (a sentence I'm tired of, but whatever) . Either the objective could keep the player moving, or they should be allowed to stay and fight on it.
The game encourages teamwork, it just doesn’t force it. The alternative would be like the rubber banding or the blue shell in Mario Cart. It keeps the races close and you get the experience the devs want but it is frustrating. Much better to find good people to play with than be forced to play a certain way.
Helldivers 1 has a downed state when your health goes to 0. You press a button repeatedly to get back up or a teammate can one tap you. I hope they bring this back in the form of a ship upgrade or something. This mechanic does encourage you to stick together. That said, I also think being able to play however you want and not being restricted to sticking together is a welcome change
I think that the map kinda does force you to stick to your team because when you split from your team on automaton missions and are you not a pro player you die pretty fast
This right here. Especially at higher difficulty levels, you can definitely feel a difference between a cohesive team and four players running around doing their own thing. The video makes a whole big deal about how the camera is the big thing here...but seriously, if a player has a problem understanding the basic concept of why 4 guns coordinated and aimed at a single target is more effective than 4 single guns aimed at 4 separate targets, then I honestly can't help you.
Splitting teams you split firepower. I've seen people struggle a lot more on their own (on higher difficulties mind you), especially running jack of all trades loadouts that turn out to be anemic most of the time, while duos or trios steamroll the map without much effort. Plus usually people is stuck bringing out generalist loadouts because most of the time you can't rely on a random doing its job. I often get stuck holding a bugbreach down with a stickle and napalm airstrikes because I brought the spear and the flamethrower guy ran off somewhere to die alone. And it would be cool to do the team reload with out losing a backpack. When you do it well it's actually worth it. But here the problem it's still the players. And to do it you need to be a full team, if you're a duo you can't afford it.
Me personally, I solo near half of the map while my teammates take the other half. We get the map cleared within 25 minutes and left by 30. Hell, we'd clear the entire map in blitz as well, but might ignore some POIs to extract earlier. It's too repetitive to role play as a squad with that big of a map to cover. If I can get by running solo and finish the game faster, I will 10/10. Unfortunately, having someone following me is a liability usually. Drawing aggro because they are not using the stealth armor, throwing strategems sealing off escape/forward routes Or worse, reinforcing me back to a fight I am actively trying to run away from. I am not rewarded for every kills, and those POIs will not clear themselves. Fights just take too long to finish too sometimes. Might have to even spend an orbital laser on it if it escalates... Ideas to make the game more teamwork friendly? 1. Have the objectives in a "single file" (L4D style) with little detours for POIs or covers. 2. Buff shield generators to recharge after shield breaks for a duration. 3. Bring back the ANGEL, ally aoe healing/repair backpack 4. Give mech suit more survivalibity 5. Buff heavy and medium armor to tank more damage damnit 6. Have an objective to have an area as big as evacuation base. Currently the objectives are in a small area and doesn't need players to work together to complete most of them. (Think of the petrol-> vehicle objectives in L4D, where a huge section of the map is for that one objective) 7. Transport vehicles to travel through the goddamned empty space. This game is a glorified running simulator. Guns are my mops and strategems are tools to throw at problems. Basically, it's not very viable to stick together during fights. Whenever a fight broke out, everyone need to disperse and survive in their own corner. As long as we can focus less on hiding and running, and more on actually gunning the enemies down, sticking together would make more sense. As for right now, sticking right next to one another like in the trailers are not possible during fights. People will disperse and maybe even run off to do something else. Extra info, I play only on helldives with randoms. Players on this difficulty are mostly relatively competent in surviving and clearing objectives. Playing on lower difficulties is actually much harder with players wasting reinforcements on teamkills and aggroing the enemies next planet over. Also probably have to carry the mission more and clear the bases and POIs myself, since they will have to ignore those with only 3 reinforcements left..
Even on Helldive I often see players throw away their reinforcements while I go off and clear a good chunk of the map with only a Scorcher and an Autocannon (not including other stratagems).
A simple way to encourage sticking together might be to increase the mission length but decrease the number of reinforcements. Separated players are more likely to be killed due to lack of support, so you'd be encouraged to stick together but have time to complete all objectives if you keep up the pace. The problem is youd still get randos running off and draining your reinforcements very quickly
Another thing from helldivers 1 they could potentially consider is the revive option when hit with less critical attacks. could keep the team close enough to each to help each other back up.
On the harder difficulties, teamwork is absolutely important. While one person is working on the objective, the other players provide cover fire and stratagems. Whenever you’re trying to complete a mission objective enemies start coming in hot and your squad mates are critical to keeping you alive. After completing the mission, that’s when I go around to the side objectives and we spread out on our own or go in pairs. Typically, when players do what you’re saying where they just run around to different objectives it’s very frustrating and difficult to complete a mission without dying and losing samples or weapons. The assisted reload issue is true, but I think that might be more like the exception than the rule. On easy difficulties, it’s simple for the match to be every man for himself but again once you start getting up into the higher difficulties, it is suicide to attempt almost anything by yourself. You have to have cover fire from your squad or nobody wins or your mission rating ends up being trash since everyone died so many times. Playing with Randos is always an issue in ANY game.
Story time: i was using a build that doesnt require a backpack. I saw my teammate who uses an autocannon leave an empty pack behind so i grabbed it and was refilling it as i picked up ammo. Then at extraction i gave em a reload and we were able to hold a line against a wall of bile titans on helldive. Working together may not be your first instinct, but that decreased reload time is worth it in the right setting.
There was a mechanic to where you got more bug breaches/bot drops when you left a certain radius of your team mates. However this hurt solo divers that would get a constant stream of patrols so they removed it.
It wasn't the bug breaches or bot drops themselves but it was the case that more roaming patrols would spawn around solo players, which meant that they had no time to rest between one bug breach or bot drop and the next one. 1-2 groups of wandering enemies would spawn nearby and walk right into the battle, which would in turn make them active participants in the fight. Those same wandering patrols could spawn in any direction and since they are directed upon spawn-in to wander towards you (not necessarily directly but nearby), you could and often would end up with instances where you'd duck behind cover to get a breather from one patrol + breach/drop combo and suddenly get ambushed by something behind you. If you were both lucky and good enough, the best case scenario was that you would have a massive horde of bots or bugs chasing you with more randomly appearing on all sides, or you'd die and get air-dropped into the middle of the swarm of enemies because the game's solo-drop design isn't that good.
@@fallingfloor6924 Yeah. More enemies would spawn in than you had bullets or missiles for, so solo players would be forced to spend the entire map trying to run away while also picking up anything that happened to be nearby. Even if they managed to sneak past a patrol group it would get aggro'd anyways because of the bots or bugs already shooting/chasing the player. The other part of the problem was an unintended bug by the devs. This bug caused patrols to spawn as if there were 4 players in the match, even if there were less than that. Imagine being a new player who doesn't even have access to 4 stratagems yet (or even good guns) and every single mission you play is just you running away from more bugs or bots than you can handle, and not actually doing the mission objectives. Because you're new and inexperienced and probably don't want to get laughed at by better players in quickmatch, your new player experience is just spending 12-40 minutes every single game slowly dying to missiles or acid spit.
the recoilless is best for buddy reloading tbh, because you can mark enemies and know when your buddy will shoot to be there in support, while the autocannon only needs reload once every few shots (most use it semi-auto) like when I see a charger, I run to my teammate with the recoilless whether the autocannon due uses it or not, however, isn’t that easy to know
Team-reloading was what drew me to the game since the idea of helping out your teammates in a fight sounded great, the implementation however is so ass backwards that it actively detracts people from using it, it only happens "naturally" when two people are running the same support weapons and even if you face an enemy that requires you to team-reload you're better off both shooting it than to use it Their own design philosophy of making us rely on strategems instead of our weapons reinforces this, why bother even coordinate with teammates to team-reload for such minimal gains when you can all just drop Airstrikes and call it a day the hidden enemy composition reinforces the "Swiss army knife" mentality since you can't be the dedicated "Chaff killer" of the team if you get something like a Bile Spewer seed The hidden POIs don't help, people want the samples, medals and Super Credits, making the hidden just reinforces people to wander around unless you get lucky and find a Radar early on
If we stuck together and rotated around the map, it’d take at least twice as long to clear the map. Also the waves of enemies if not fully cleared while holding a tight position, otherwise will cause this unintended endless grind. The entire team needs to be committed to clearing otherwise there’s no rest periods, as it should be. The armor selection itself already determines the pace of the game. If the entire team is in heavy, we’re not going for a full clear of the map which means less samples or if cleared it’ll be close to 50 minutes.
Well I have a small thing to say. What about the game's design for father away teamwork options? I mean if staying close together isn't good then what about keeping away from each other and pointing to points where you can ambush?
playing in pairs seems to be the bets strategy, atleast in my opinion you have enough total ground coverage between the 2 teams, but each pair has enough firepower to deal with any problem they face dying also means your buddy just calls you back in where you were, instead of a teammate calling you in on the other end of the map.
When you find a food team, you play exactly like the marketing shows, and that is the most Helldivers experience you can get from the game, play as a synchronized team without the need of any communication, jyst flowing with them while you comolete all the missions like nothing
I don't understand this. Even with randoms they always understand the objective at the least. Sometimes you'll have the occasional bad player but that's with any coop game. Most of the time players stick together, A lot I see people running anti-tank and crowd clearing weapons. I even go into chat and ask randoms for backpacks to help them reload.
Ya, this is a co-op game if you want it to be. I always play with randoms, and I have no issue enjoying the loose o-op mechanism in this game, and I'm pretty sure my teammates enjoyed it too
So holding Veren Wells gives a liberation bonus on the bot front right? What if there was a similar bonus when close to one or more divers? No punishment for going solo but being in proximity to the team could give a 5% boost to reload speed/damage negation/accuracy
Here are some ideas: add enemies that pin you down, similar to the special infected in Left 4 Dead, requiring someone or something to kill it or knock it off of you to free you. While this wouldn't force players to stick together, it would make it a heck of a lot smarter to at least go in pairs Increase the time limit on harder difficulties. It's so easy to get bogged down into a loop of reinforcement call-ins with no way out, especially when detector towers are involved. I think that the breach/drop system needs reworking in general, but that's a topic for another day Add more objectives that take longer to complete without your squad present. For example: multiple divers logging into a terminal and standing nearby can increase how quickly data gets transferred, or manually hold open some valves to fuel an ICBM faster. However, this shouldn't harm solo players (since your whole squad crashing at once is still a serious issue)
I'm not a huge fan of the idea of pin-down mechanics (because if it's on bugs they're already bad enough with hunters packs leaping on you to death), but I 100% agree on having more teammwork mechanics. Make the oil collection mission have 2 terminals that operate different sections of the pipe-laying puzzle. Change the SEAF Artillery objective to let it get loaded without blocking the rest of the tasks from being completed on the terminal. That one change alone would make it feel more like a cooperative objective because while my friends are looking for the best shells to load into the weapon I could be at the terminal getting its arming and aiming software ready.
Also would not be opposed to a backpack only call in option at like half the amount of time similar to an eagle rearm effect simply to get more ammo or give to a teammate that had a back packless weapon. Call it rushed rearm and give half a pack of ammo.
I once got reinforced far away from my previous gear. My Reconciles Rifle was on cooldown, but I found this Spear backpack with one round. No clue where the Spear was. I found my teammate with the Spear, i picked up a few ammo packs along the way, which gave me 3 rounds. I followed him around and reloaded him until I ran out.
They should do like Fatshark's Warhammer games and have an aura of about 50m that the more squad mates in the aura the bigger boost of the more buffs. So it could be called a Morale boost and allow every member in the aura to gain one buff of 5% damage/stamina recovery/reload speed/health regen up to a total of 20%, player chooses which single buff they want on ship. 11:31 Or you can do 5-10% of each buff, 1 other person with you 10% damage buff, 2 people with you 10% damage and reload speed buff, 3 with you get 10% damage, reload speed and damage reduction buff etc
A well coordinated team will perform better. Not just with assisted reloads and such but with flanking, covering fire, etc. i think the weak spot on hulks is a good opportunity for teamwork
Oh well, combining strategems, enfilade/defilade, overwatch actions, flanking maneuvers, baiting an enemy patrols, support play and more isn't supported by HD2 game design... Totally agree if you doesn't want to do it. The game design doesn't force teamwork but encourages it. Team reloads is a god-tier when you got better communication and understand what you're doing: - not sticking to a player but staying near and assisting only for reload(not like you've shown, most of the assisted reloads doesn't require your constant engagement with first player especially spear given it's targeting time), - doing it only when you need it(many heavy enemies need one AT shot, and team reload is needed when you want to delete this gunship patrol from the sky in a mere seconds or any other heavy like a bile titan), - choosing the right position to do it(if you going for anti-air make sure that you got yourself a nice enclosed position, if for anti-tank get those flanks covered by some rock or building). Most heavy enemies, especially on the bot side has a rear weak spot aka heat vent. That encourages teamwork as one player baits the target and other shoots the vent/chargers butt. Many enemies has narrow cone of view to allow players flanking maneuvers. There is a controlled reinforcement drop onto enemies by another player to deal damage.
There is a secret for the team reload. I used to feel the same way as you about team reload until I figured out the trick. Now that I know what you're supposed to do I don't want them to change it. It's very viable and massively powerful especially if you have a team member with a supply pack. Reloading your backpack while you reload your friend's auto Cannon rocket launcher or spear. I'll give you a hint. You don't need to do a backpack switcheroo with your teammate
Finally someone actually talking about this (agreeing with OhDough I tihnk hes beening saying this for ages). I was watching a video saying how to support your teamates with the spear its a complete waste of ur time and if ur caught alone with an enemy reinforments ur screwed and its just silly its so fucking annoying when I see people saying holding hands is the only way to play, this is why they removed the Retreive Essential Personnel (thanks alot to the people who complained you just got a free sample farm mission removed that mission was exremly easy if u played it right 2 and 2 or 1 and 3 i even completed it with 3 off of obj btws) the ONLY actual OBJ that requires teamwork is the Bunker which is easily solved with 2 and 2 or even better just ignore the damn bunker and focus on mission. Helldivers 2 should never be played as a 4 man squad single entity.
Everything youre saying makes sense, but i think the number 1 issue is lack of microphones If everyone was more interested in voice chat, communication and teamwork would go way up
I think the type of community Helldivers 2 has is comparable to the supportiveness and teamwork encouraged community of Warframe. Anything the game lacks in instructions is passed onto newer players by those who have already been playing for sometime and I am all for that.
I believe Helldivers 2 just need to design missions that can be made faster while having more people and about the backpack being able to be used with the gun's user backpack, (as being said in the video). Because (that is my opinion, but IDK if that is the case), it seems they are designing it as someone doing the mission objective while everyone else (if they are grouped together or in pair) being guards in the case there is an attack. That would encorage some teamwork (seeing the other comments, is not that there is no teamwork, but is not encoraged) without removing the freedom of being able to do things solo, as well, lets face it, there are times that you don't want to go with random players and your friends are not available or you just want to have your solo time in the game.
When Bob is off shoving samples in his pocket and Joe is taking out every outpost on the map, they may feel like a couple of Rambo's "doing what has to be done" but meanwhile player 3 & 4 may be faced with 3x the enemies the difficulty level demands
People make whole videos but never ever would think of taking no support stratagem, using a mates support weapon after the first cooldown and being able to assist reload without "foregoing a 1/4th of helldivers powerbudget". Teamwork starts in the loadout screen
I usually split from the team to do the opposite of the map.clearing both main and side objectives on that part with less aggro than a tandem. But if there is a new to the helldive level. I stuck with the group and just split to do the remaining side objective at the far side while they wait at extraction and just in case I fail,they could just reinforce me and extract
It would be controversial but had they set a limited range on the boosters, that could have been enough to get players to stick together more. However, as it stands, the game is very much so a choose your own strategy where multiple ways to play are viable.
I think your critique is fair. How would you tweak the design in the case of helldivers 2 to foster teamwork? You mentioned not requiring a backpack on the assistant for assisted reloads. What else?
helldivers 2 players do solo on some mission but its not the mass. i play on higher difficulty with random guys and its mostly in 2 groups or as one group
what if helmets had an ability where you get a boost the more players stayed together. like a radar boost to see more enemies on the map. a vision boost in snowstorms with echo pings. damage boost. pinging an enemy lovers defense depending on how many ping it..
Honestly, a tank could be the best teamwork vehicle. Need four players to drive, reload, aim and shoot, and an LMG on top. A very strong vehicle which only reaches that potential with a full team.
I honestly find the teamwork pretty well done, with friends ironically its impossible, but I played with randoms that made the teamwork just click, and its fascinating, although in diff 9/8/maybe 7 its impossible, the bots are gonna throw you, and the bugs are gonna make you run away from the team
I'm sorry man, ive played DRG, vermintide 2, the division, and helldivers 2 and i can confidently say helldivers 2's teamwork is the best. At higher difficulties you just cant beat the game without working together and working together in a well-oiled manner. We split off into teams of two to clear the map and complete objectives, we design the team's loadout and roles together, and tackle the whole map as one unit. 400 hours of play and i can tell you that its all about teamwork and the game is an excellent platform for it. You just need to find the right people and dive with them.
That works great if you have friends to play with but when just playing with randoms everyone just does their own thing. Even in Helldive. Sure you might stay loosely together but you don't really interact with your teammates often. This is not the case in DRG where even randoms work together.
Sure! Here's my suggestion though. I only have so many friends who will play, so I started mic-ing up and I've already made like half a dozen buddies from random matches! One is also a vet and turns out he lives like an hour away lol. So that'll probably be a drinking buddy too 😂 Really though, if you haven't tried, please do! Good feels all around when you find people that click with you. @@achillesa5894
The teamwork is necessary when you drop slightly above your skill level, which is also when the game is (arguably) most fun. The point about friends is that the in-game friend system is there to mitigate that problem. You have to drop with randoms for awhile, but if you friend the people that use teamwork you can build a network of people to play with… when the system is working. Its not perfect, but it can help. I’d suggest not looking for friends on helldive because people playing helldive either have a team, don’t need a team, or are so far over their head that you are unlikely to be able to join them before they fail the mission. Try around difficulty 4-6, where players are starting to feel the difficulty ramp up and may not be experts at all the mechanics yet. People playing just slightly above their skill level make great teammates because they need to use teamwork to survive, and newer players may be more open to taking advice and changing playstyle to accommodate teamwork. Personally, I friend anyone who uses their microphone and isnt toxic. And a few who use teamwork without microphones. I find one in roughly 3/10 to 4/10 games played with randoms, but that number can feel skewed if you play the whole operation with people that do not talk/communicate. If you are trying to find people to play with, consider joining other peoples games, hopping around between missions instead of hosting.
Raises hand: I hear what you are saying. I even agree when it is with players you don't know, however, teamwork with guys you know can make a Helldive feel easy. Teamwork is there if you want it.
This is an interesting point, as Helldivers also has a solo option if you want it. That as a core possibility radically limits ways to do teamwork. It will always be optional to work as a team because it will always be optional to play co-op. Similar to Helldive, it becomes easier as co-op, but its not required. The onyl real "co-op lever" the devs have is difficulty, and even that adapts to solo play slightly.
@@leegofilmsit doesn't really have solo though, as AH has made it clear with game design and repeatedly in patch notes that they don't want us to play solo. They don't want one player to be able to handle everything, and they don't want hard difficulties to be easy. They interpret those two priorities as meaning it's necessary to make it harder and less convenient to play solo than to play with a group
A team does make certain things easier, due to the fact you’ve got an extra 3 guns in the area. Concentrating firepower does make an impact, especially when the game decides to play unfairly and drop army on your head :)
@G1beonGames I think it goes beyond concentrated firepower. A perfect example is orbital lasers on a bunker mission. You call out your throws as to not waste a stratagem. A good team is like clockwork, each hand does its part to run smoothly.
@@G1beonGamesit‘s also notable that hulks/chargers being easier to damage (heatsink/bilesack) when not facing the player (and tanks aswell, to a degree) and suppression fire aid this. you and bots become less accurate when receiving damage, so a buddy providing covering fire is really helpful and more suppressio. fire taking place reduces damage taken because the enemies are not only eliminated quicker, but also hit less often
In high levels it is encouraged to split in 2 and 2. The need for a buddy is because the game is brutal and mistakes are heavy punished, and you will make mistakes. A buddy helps with respawning at your old spot.
The reward for players is not killing stuff then extracting, it is samples and other items you can pick up and extract with. Having a buddy cuts down the time of running around to recover lost item.
Yes, if the players are extremely good at what they are doing then there is little need for a buddy. But those are extreme scenarios and any implementation will have extreme scenarios that the implementation cannot cover.
Right on! The design can't account for the extremes. The 2 and 2 split is a great compromise at higher levels, it may not be what Arrowhead was marketing but it goes a long way to strengthen the aesthetic of teamwork.
I am annoyed when all three team mates are hellbent on following me. Since bot drops and bug breaches can only happen once every X minutes depending on difficulty (and Localized Confusion), it encourages splitting up.
The ideal situation is a person running to points of interests triggers one, then the other three split up and do main/side objectives with little resistance. Calling out when it happens and knowing when the next time enemies can reinforce can give team mates focusing on objectives more confidence, especially when going after already heavily defended enemy territory.
@@alexanderrobins7497 True but that is a tactic that I personally do not like because it usually ends up in sacrificing that one that triggered reinforcements.
Also it is easy to make a mistake and the reinforcements to be triggered by the one responsible in getting samples.
In my opinion the scenario you described falls into "extreme scenarios". You either very good at what you are doing or are playing intentionally on low difficulty, much lower then what you are capable.
Yeah I just abandon the team (as lead) if I end up in a team where everyone just splits off doing their own thing completely. Pairs is understandable. But some people join groups to play alone - I think they're lost, so I send them back to where they want to be.
Deep Rock Galactic would be an interesting comparison. In DRG the map is designed to keep the team together as the team is pushed through a cave that can have tight passage ways. Additionally, the characters have certain restrictions like engineer finding it hard to reach his own platforms up high, whilst the scout benefits from having something to stand on.
In Helldivers 2, Maps are open and do not push the team together. Additionally folk do not wish to restrict themselves in one aspect to gain an advantage in another, like restricted themselves from fighting certain enemies to demolish others, as people cannot rely on other players to cover their weaknesses, especially randoms.
Best example for needed teamwork
I'll put it on the list. That's actually really interesting how the design of the game world influences player cooperation. I'm not too familiar with Deep Rock Galactic, but I've been meaning to look into. Thank you for the suggestion :)
@@G1beonGamesgo play DRG, the whole thing is a great design on how to make your teammates work together. I'm surprised that Helldivers doesn't have any grapple type enemies that requires a teammate to free you from, L4D2 proved that it was a good way to incentivise sticking together(along with their map design)
DRG also doesn't punish you for using certain weapons, i.e. being either unable to kill an enemy or requiring you to waste a huge amount of ammo to do so.
DRG is an excellent co-op shooter, I just wish it had slightly more variety.
Another thing encouraging splitting up is bot drops/ bug breaches. If a dibe clearing a light or medium nest/outpost triggers one, that substantially reduces the risk other players take when completing higher priority objectives, given that they are aome distance from the breach/drop
I have noticed this too, even on Helldive people may loosely stick together (or not, splitting up is common) but you don't really interact with your teammates. You mostly just exist near each other, shoot in the same general direction, and reinforce when someone dies. In contrast, in let's say Deep Rock Galactic you often see teamwork between randoms, like Engineer placing platforms for Scout, Driller freezing an enemy and Gunner taking it out etc.
There's multiple core issues here imo: The game doesn't encourage specialization, instead the best practice is for everyone to run a generalist loadout where you can deal with everything, and there aren't enough (perceived) penalties for splitting up and not enough rewards for staying together.
Cool vid essay and well made, I have to say the intro is the complete opposite of my experience. I play with randoms all the time and have no trouble working with them on when and where Resupplies are called, which enemy position is the priority, and getting two people in one place to open a bunker.
If there's a problem with teamwork, it's that everyone tries to run a "jack of all trades" loadout since getting separated from your stuff is a common occurrence, especially when joining midgame into a shitshow. No one wants to be the "anti heavy" guy surrounded by chaff, or the jumppack scout pinned down by Hulks, so we all try to come prepared for anything.
That one behavior in its own right encourages players to go off on their own and try to do everything themselves, because that's what they designed their loadout to do.... it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you design your loadout around working with your team, and then actually stick with them, you'll find people like to work together on almost any task and you'll make friends everywhere you go.
It ain't Left4Dead2 level of teamwork.
But, with the right squad and right Helldiver.
You'd have a lot of fun.
While still goofing about without being shouted at by a dude from Maxico.
Or Latino.
Or Chinese.
Or German.
And maybe Aussies, but those guys are the best to be with.
Especially my friend Josh, who is a fricking madlad of a Aussie Helldiver.
Exactly. It may not be Left4Dead2, but with the right team Helldivers 2 becomes an unforgettable experience. Also, Aussies are the best - no bias
MEXICO MENTIONED!!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥 🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽
@@G1beonGames Helldivers 2 would be a completely different experience if there are regular enemies that can pin down and disable a player with a single attack out of nowhere like Hunters or Smokers in Left 4 Dead. The closest thing to it is the Stalkers that can ragdoll players, but ragdolls are temporary and can be escaped from and Stalkers only spawn in some areas anyway.
@ArifRWinandar
Yeah, pinning enemies will be troublesome in a game like Helldiver.
The reason why L4D did it better is because of its three AI-teammate and the map layout.
In Helldivers, if added pinning enemies, it's basically a death sentence because there's no one there to help you.
And it will get really annoying real fast.
Yep. Aussies are nice 😇
Id argue there is a buddy mechanic. Reinforce. You want a battle buddy to Reinforce you on your backpack and support weapon
I'd say that the effectiveness of Reinforce is down to a player's level of experience in the game. The more experienced someone is, the less likely they are to die. Therefore, having a buddy to reinforce you is not entirely necessary. Even the most experienced players still die sometimes, but I have personally found that to be a minor setback.
This hardly ever happens, but I wish it was true
@@G1beonGames
You could argue that for left4deads system, to some degree. A really skilled player can just shoot the special infected before getting grabbed.
But that game doesnt have easy respawning so the risk is not generally worth it.
Lol if only more people realized that I want to be rezzed at (or as close as possible) to my corpse. Respawn etiquette is still hit or miss unfortunately. I wonder about the consequences of shrinking the mission reinforcement budget for the playerbase... 20 extra guys for a team of 4 is a lot.
Your experience is very different then mine. When i play the team is usually in one big group working together or breaking into pairs and working together.
But the design still gives space for people to go if on their own if they want or if necessary to complete something.
I feel team work opportunities are still there and if you do too much to force it, you are reducing the design of the game and making people play a certain way.
Right. The video seems to think that teamwork means that all 4 players are grouped together working on the same thing at all times, and that's not always the case - sometimes, having one player working alone or splitting the squad into pairs is a form of team coordination. Sometimes, it's strategic to peel off a player to deal with a small side objective while the larger team deals with something bigger - you don't need the entire team to be tied up with running super samples back to extract, or taking out an unauthorized broadcast, spore tower, or Shrieker nest (where a few whacks from a single 'diver with a quasar cannon at range will get the job done), for example. This is especially true on the 12-minute blitz missions, where you might need to split into teams if you want to get everything done (especially if the map happens to have something time-consuming like SEAF Artillery as a secondary).
You guys are right
@@ASFalcon13 I acknowledge that teamwork isn't always about grouping up in one location. As you said, sometimes splitting the group in the best choice in the moment. I prefer it this way. (I might not have made that clear in the conclusion) However, I'd argue Arrowhead's definition of teamwork is more like the 4 man group working shoulder to shoulder. The marketing, interviews, and promotional images. They all show this kind of teamwork. Which creates a dichotomy that I wanted to explore in the video.
But I fully agree with what you're saying, sticking together isn't always the best idea and not always the case.
On the part where you mention that there isn't a benefit of being together, there actually is. If you play on Helldive, you get way more enemies to deal with if they drop/breach. I can survive it alone and beat it, but it takes time, with a team? Well, those drops/breaches become way quicker, making it easy to actually get to said objective. I like to believe that the lower difficulties are there just to teach you the mechanics, Helldive is where you put that into combination with your teammates.
Or just let one person hold off the breach and the others can have easier time clearing out objectives
You kept mentioning that there's no buddy mechanics. I'd love to hear what that might look like within the confines of the current game, 3rd person and all.
Off the top of my head, being able to share ammo, vehicles (being limited to 1 or 2) which have no offensive abilities without another Hell Diver, & maybe (as you mentioned) having some effect on the speed, or even, complexity of objective completion with more Divers on it.
I'm right there with you that the buddy reloads should be pulling from the shooters pack. It just makes sense, though it could cause wonkieness with drone packs of the loader where I could see the shooter catching some DMG, maybe even a death.
I think vehicles would be a good move as well, maybe put those as one of those stratagems that wen automatically get in all missions rather than having to have someone equip it like a mech.
HD1 has a lot of this.
@@25bitgamerx36 that's good to hear. It'll make it that much more likely to make it into HD2. 🤙
ThiccfilA had a recent podcast (posted on UA-cam) and one of the guests mentioned that teamloading would be too powerful if it didnt require the backback.
Apparently its a really powerful mechanic if your team sticks close together.
I imagine having 2 people sticking together with AT and supply pack would be able to delete massive amounts of heavy enemies very quickly, possibly making the “too many chargers” patch very manageable.
Put the supply pack on a 3rd teammate and have the loader use the Autocannon so they can switch from teamloading AT to teamloading anti-mediums…
I can easily see that team taking out difficulties beyond Helldive.
As far as I'm aware, sticking close together does actually reduce enemy patrol(?) spawns. Of course, this mechanic isn't obvious from in-game info, but I want to point it out as one of the few mechanics that encourages staying close (for those who know about it.) Also, I guess resupplies might encourage sticking together. Not very strong options, but it's something.
The problem with this mechanic of introducing more patrol spawns for split players is that your other teammates are very unlikely to experience any added trouble, especially if they are on the far side of the map. If anything that makes it more worthwhile for players to split up and go far away from each other so our patrols don't interfere with another player's work. So our options are either to work as a team close together or to be as far apart from each other as possible. Unfortunately more skilled players do not need to be near their other teammates to contribute so they'll be the first ones to run off by themselves.
This is true, sticking together will reduce the spawns of enemy patrols. And resupply is very helpful to have and share. Unfortunately, they're just not prominent enough to keep the team together. Experienced players can easily handle these added challenges.
@@G1beonGames Very true
Yeah but for those of us that run at 7+ as our standard we are generally perfectly capable of handling many, many spawns simultaneously totally solo, especially against the bugs, and frankly this is the only way to make the bugs really challenging.
It's a combination of kiting, close air support, and stealth.
Playing as a blob gets boring fast for me, outside of final extraction I rarely want more than one other player anywhere near me.
It wasnt sticking together that reduces patrols it was Solo players patrols were increased and as players join the mission patrol decrease wich I beleive is now no longer a thing in the recent patch
Take this wisdom to heart. If players don't want to work as a team, they will not, no matter how many game mechanics are baked in to encourage teamwork.
Left 4 Dead
@@medievalknyght313 in Left 4 Dead teamwork is not encouraged, it's mandatory. Anyone who strays from the group will be dead in an instant unless rescued by other players.
@@ArifRWinandar My point still stands Left 4 dead uses game mechanics to make people work together.
Deep Rock Gallactic would disagree.
@@medievalknyght313 and my point is that if someone is determined to be a lone wolf, they will.
I think the game strives as a good middle ground between needing tons of cohesion between players and allowing player freedom during missions.
Some players simply don’t want to work as part of a team. It takes effort, coordination, patience, and a different set of skills than being a lone wolf.
The game allows both playstyles to thrive, and as a result, I’ve noticed that most missions hit this middle ground between necessary cooperation and splitting up to cover objectives. There’s a lot of things not mentioned in this video that contribute to the game being even more team-oriented than games like DRG.
When people complained about it being near impossible at certain times to solo level 9 missions [in a team oriented game] I just laughed at them, and I still do, but we definitely should be looking more into how to fix team mechanics. For assisted reload it really is as simple as making it so 1. You are not getting kicked off the assisted reload constantly every time a pebble gets in your way, and 2. making it so the assister uses the assisted's backpack instead of their own. First one will be hard to implement but the second one is the main thing.
Not being encouraged to stick together for objectives in normal missions is true, and I think that the defense missions are fairly good about encouraging teamwork, but they have their problems. 1. Practically or sometimes actually 0 samples in defense missions. If you want to play the MO defending a planet, you have to sacrifice your ability to progress in getting samples to upgrade ship modules. This is why I refuse to play any defense missions at all unless I am trying a new strategem only available on that planet, such as the commando. A new player cannot play a defense mission or else they are actively hindering their progress. 2. Currently, the launch 8 rockets mission is not possible in level 9's, unless you get some majorly good RNG. Right now, they are spawning Bile Titans and Factory Striders directly on top of the objective, meaning if you even attempt to play it, you will eventually lose about 4 rockets in due to something completely unavoidable, creating a frustrating experience. These 2 things combined means that as a player who has not 100% the game, you have no incentive to play the only team focused missions, and one of which will just screw you over whether or not you play right.
We have the ability to ping, we have the ability to hold that button for our characters to talk, we need to be able to hold the button for custom pings. Its hard to tell who is talking when someone uses that feature, if you set a ping labeled [I need assistance] then people would know exactly where to go to help their teammates. Or even making it so you can do a self-ping that says "Team Reload Request" would be great with the team reload changes. Just spitballing a few ideas.
Weapons are too powerful. I do not necessarily think this should be altered, but as is the weapon combinations we have as players with over 30-40 hours in the game are powerful enough to easily solo a level 9 bot or bug mission. Problem is, this cannot be fixed without severely dividing and killing the community. The game was far too easy when it launched, and as its gone on its gotten harder, and most of the community has disliked it becoming harder. They have had it easy for long enough now that if the game becomes hard enough to incentivize teamwork, even if all my changes were implemented, people would still be enraged.
A weird one, but I personally feel teamwork can't work because after the PSN linking controversy, a large portion of the community still playing are idiots. I am not saying its bad to have people who are not very smart, but if we are trying to play team oriented, you will get tired of playing if your teammates are just clueless. We lost a huge lot of people across many countries due to them still being banned, and many smart people such as PirateSoftware are not playing the game until the ban is lifted. What is left is a community of people who have not gotten good enough to feel bored, and these are the main ones that make their lobbies public or drop SOS beacons, so they are taking up the majority of public games. Lots of the good players who are smart and good enough to play team oriented only play intermittently or just solo, partly because of getting bored, having lives, and public games are riddled with teamkillers and if you choose to join others games, will often kick you for doing something that slightly pissed them off.
Another great video essay.
I think a good stopgap to address the teamwork issue is implementing more “hard” teamwork systems. Namely, the release of the APC and tanks, which will require multiple players to use efficiently compared to a single support weapon package.
yeah this game actually makes it easier to go solo rather than being on a team, like its easier to stick togheter to have fun and do some obectives but if we really want to do everything on the map its just better to split up and not engage with anything. And more with the automatons where they are easier to deal with
The only thing that absolutely requires team play are the bunker doors. Most of the time I'm by myself when I find one, so I just have to leave it behind knowing there could be two stacks of super credits inside.
Honestly when I first learned of assisted reload I expected to be able to reload my buddy using the backpack on their back.
In universe what's the difference between taking it from my back or theirs? Heck, it'ss probably easier to reach left or right than over and backwards.
It was meant to mirror real life military units where one guy carries the weapon and the other carries the ammunition, but I agree that we should be able to assist reload anytime we want
@@segevkrespi8609 Yeah, I definitely see where they're coming from, but I also hope that they implement this at one point or another.
The key difference is in the recoil of weapons like the Spear or Recoilless Rifle, because to get to their ammo more efficiently you'd be in the back of the line of fire. Imagine getting a concussion every time your buddy tried to fire the weapon you were reloading, and getting knocked back because of the blast.
The game logic should be that the assisted reload comes from the firing backpack unless the helldiver giving the assisted reload has a backpack with compatible ammo, which then takes it from the assistor's back pack.
Rational, I often get a backpack from my spear using friend. I am extra ammo and a reload speed buff. If only the one firing the weapon has ammo used, then we would have to do a backpack swap instead of me just going off to destroy non-heavy enemies. Additionally it also opens up possible gameplay where a backpack support weapon which does not usually need to fire often could not be the one carrying a backpack and just needs a mere moment of time from the designated loader to be combat operational again.
@@segevkrespi8609real life: accurate
game: clunky and annoying, real life is usually a lot more planned out especially in military terms. In this game world, you are heavily restricted in what you can actually bring/should bring. At the very least, assisted reload should drain from the shooter's backpack first. And THEN feed from the assistant
Assistant reload can be really good with extracting like the recoilless rifle can easily take down bigger bugs that could cause a problem if you took too long with reloading
I am a helldiver that actually enjoys the team reloading mechanics, that being said the backpack is its Achilles' heel. But its more than faster reloading for the fight but the increasing damage output of the pair. Sure one player forfeiting their dps for their partner may sound silly, but when you are emptying an ENTIRE Autocannon pack into a wave of endless bots you think differently.
I will admit, when you've got your autocannon on auto fire and 2 backpacks worth of ammo. You feel like a god with the buddy reload
Here are some ideas: add enemies that pin you down, similar to the special infected in Left 4 Dead, requiring someone or something to kill it or knock it off of you to free you. While this wouldn't force players to stick together, it would make it a heck of a lot smarter to at least go in pairs. Probably a better idea to keep these enemies out of solo play, and make them more common as the squad gets bigger
Increase the time limit on harder difficulties. It's so easy to get bogged down into a loop of reinforcement call-ins with no way out, especially when detector towers are involved. I think that the breach/drop system needs reworking in general, but that's a topic for another day
Add more objectives that take longer to complete without your squad present. For example: multiple divers logging into a terminal and standing nearby can increase how quickly data gets transferred, or manually hold open some valves to fuel an ICBM faster. However, this shouldn't harm solo players (since your whole squad crashing at once is still a serious issue)
The game already has several cheap ways of killing players, rockets and stun locking bug attacks being the main things. Players have universally despised these, and the devs have made repeated efforts to make them less cheap (rocket damage models were improved to prevent insta death, helmets with heavy armor offer more protection, stun intensity and duration have been improved). Adding this in would be a very unwelcome change.
I agree with point 2
I also agree with part 3
Timer is definitely too short on hard missions with low timers. 12minutes to (ideally) destroy all the fabs, grab all the samples, AND extract (probably without air support by then)
Don't worry the Illuminate will arrive and then the bug players AND not players can complain about how much they hate the mechanics of the faction
Ok now this was a really good video, touching on game design always shows how subtly fundamental it is, and how wonky a game can get terribly wonky when that one thing is done in a way that clashes with other elements. Thank you for pointing this out!
I'll come over this with a slightly different perspective.
Context: my country does mandatory military training and we're separated to 3 main parts; Army, Police and Civil Defence. So im prefacing this with a bit of knowledge in how military teams work as compared to civil ones.
Basically, military strike teams have roles attached to them. Someone is the overwatch, others can be the breach while some will be vanguard. Everyone is trained similarly at the foundations, you get to use different weapons and get details on each type with its pros and cons. But ultimately, you are assigned a role so that the operation runs smoothly and without much overlap (which causes wasted time and effort).
However, contingency plans are laid out in which someone else will have to cover a different role if one of your team is down. Even so, most of the time, strike teams are so good at what they do that the contingency plans remain redundancy, as it should.
Coming back to HD2, its obvious why the game mechanics stayed as that, they are based in terms of real life military teams. If someone is on the console, someone else is the overwatch, someone else is on the variable obj, etc. And this can be switched around seamlessly.
The idea here is CHOICE. You can choose to play with others but you can also play solo. While i agree with your point in team reload and different game perspective, id say the game mechanics itself leans more towards communicative teamwork, which HD2 has lots of. From VC to pinging things on the map. But therein lies the whole point; its a CHOICE.
Had the devs executed strict roles like classes (although i would love to have these in the game) or weapon limitations, the game wouldnt have burst into the scene as it is. Imagine needing to have a heavy gunner only for the last guy to choose a light armored scout. In a game with friendly fire? That will just upped the griefing. Hence why the openness of the game mechanics itself.
Man your videos are so good, and your animations are funny, I have no idea how after getting mulitple 10K plus views on a video you still have under a thousand subs. CMON PEOPLE SUB ALREADY!
The joke about the Oil Refinery valves not counting is really spot on. Too many of the mission objectives we have to deal with can be solved by 1 player. That's not to say that every objective needs to have 2 players (the "bunker door" option), but turning a valve takes only a couple seconds compared to say, a full on second terminal with its own puzzles to solve.
In fact the only reason why many of these objectives could possibly need a second or third player to help out is when there are enemies nearby shooting at you. If I am the one being shot at then my ally who has been largely ignored can (relatively) safely complete the objectives. But the moment that the fighting is over it's usually better for my allies to move on to other parts of the mission while I stay behind to finish off the remaining tasks.
The only real counterpoint to this is the Geological Survey missions because of the forced bug breaches and bot drops, but with enough patience and cover both of those can be handled solo. Just the other day I was doing the Nuke Hatcheries mission and went off to solo one of the main objectives while my entire team handled the last one. Even though I spent most of my time running away from the terminids, I was still able to solo the defense phase of the drill tasks before I died. Even worse, my teammates weren't able to 3-man their own objective and ran away from it to give me a hand, but by then I had taken out enough of the bugs that I was able to run straight to the drill and tell it to detonate. The only time I needed my team at that point was when I had died, but that was well after the arming time so I hadn't actually lost any progress, and I didn't even need them to help me shoot my way to the terminal because I had killed or lured away the most challenging leftovers before I had died.
Spot on! The only real benefit for a team to be in one place is to deal with the enemies, but with some patience and practice, that benefit is not needed. It's great to have them there, but not necessary.
@@G1beonGames That's why in my mind Deep Rock Galactic is a better cooperative game. Then again, DRG can get away without a top-down camera angle because of the confined spaces inside the asteroid.
There is co-op in Helldivers 2. You need another person to open the bunker door. The end.
I bring up DRG as well. One thing to note about DRG community is that while it's NOW friendly and cooperative bunch of players, it was a "game culture" cultivated over years. Early DRG had a lot of solo minded players, but the design of the game, the charm of it and slow but steady collective thought of "No dwarf left behind" made the community what it was today. Probably only game where I can join up with randoms 99% of the time and have helluva good teamwork right off the bat.
Hellidvers 2 community is still young and full of soloists and people unwilling to cooperate or even communicate. But there are seeds of DRG-like community. I been in several missions where no diver was left behind, they were reinforced back on the field so they can get to a shuttle. Sure, Helldivers 2' design isn't singposting for cooperation like DRG is. Heck, I like the fact that splitting up IS effective strategy and when a team of divers come together to cooperate, grab stratagems and primaries to supplement each other, stick to their fire duties... It's beautiful to experience.
I love clearing a Helldive map with a team of four solid divers able to quickly and independently clear out objectives all over the map simultaneously. We might be hundreds of meters apart but we are still working as a team to complete the objective and side objectives, all on the same map. Extraction is where the team comes back together.
I've understood that from the first minute, there are a lot of cuts, very short clips that rapidly change, pretty much that when it changes your brain goes "OOOH NEW SCENE!" so you just get attracted, that's where a lot of retention comes in. The thumbnail, it's eye-catching, it also increases curiosity, like "what is the dichotomy of teamwork in helldivers?", it catch's more CTR. The opener? I guess you can it that. It's a funny moment, then the rising music in the background. It also talking very slightly on what Helldivers 2 even is, with a slight bit of comedic effect. (and there more im just too demotivated)
HE CHANGED THE THUMBNAIL
I think one area that AH did well in encouraging teamwork is the weapon loadout choices. For example, me and a buddy of mine always cheese Helldive difficulty terminids by me bringing a fire only loadout for crowd control (flamethrower, napalm, and supply pack with incendiaries), and he brings the quasar, rail cannon, and 500 KG for the titans and charger. The recent major balancing patch reinforced planning around loadouts with your teammates since it’s no longer ONLY just everyone bringing only AT weapons for the old ridiculous titan and charger spam, but rather one or two focusing on titans and the others planning to cover each others weakness with dealing with the massive hordes of hunters and shriekers that attack you now on Helldive difficulty.
Thank you for mentioning the assistive reload mechanic. I want this mechanic to be viable so badly!
The benefit of teamwork is you double your firepower by having a battle buddy.
Having 8 slots of stratagems to mix and match can make an objective really easy since you can deal with any enemy since you have such a wide pool to draw from
Alot of the issues in the video can be solved by communicating with your team in lobby and mid mission
Communication is not a guarantee. Communication would solve many of the points I brought up in the video, no argument there. But that requires level of coordination and communication that, from my experience, is rare to encounter.
@@G1beonGames I can almost always communicate with my team (when they are randoms) with marking locations on the mini-map, or tagging a location in line of sight, using the emoticons, and even just typing a few words in chat, and almost always get a response in the form of a thumbs up emote, secondary marking, or just action alone, which has been and is fine by me.
Every once in a while, I get an absolute dullard of a team or teammate to cock up everything, but that has been the exception thankfully.
Buddy loading from their backpack would be amazing.
I strongly agree with point 1. Point 2 feels impossible without making a completely different game, which I'm guessing is why you didn't offer any solutions for that issue. Point 3 I have mixed feelings. Co-op objectives only make sense if the second player actually adds fun to the experience, (e.g. most anything from It Takes Two). What I hate are obnoxious barriers to force cooperation such as two-button doors, or, as mentioned in the comments, player X can jump high, player Y can't).
In the case of HD2, having a limited pool of stratagems definitely encourages cooperation; but then again, being able to isolate bot drops discourages sticking together.
Well made video! You'll definitely be getting more subs in no time!
You're right on the money with point 2! I brought it up only because the change in perspective is the reason players can run off now, because the camera isn't boxing them in.
And I totally agree with what you're saying about the mission design. Cooperation should be naturally built into the design, not forced onto the player. After all, that would ruin the fun, and games are supposed to be entertainment. (most of the time anyway)
Allow reloading from either backpack.
When you are assisting, allow the character to separate slightly and run/follow and auto re-assist to maintain movement of the player doing the attacking in what is a heavily movement oriented game.
Allow the assisting player the ability to call in stratagems without disengageing and use a side arm to fend off nearby units.
I never knew the Spear had a support reload...
Someone was my reloader three times so far in my 108 levels of playing this game. It's like magic how much faster you can shoot
I support reloaded a random in my squad, took out like 4 gunships in 5 seconds
Any weapon that comes with a backpack, Recoiless, Spear, Airburst, Autocannon, ect, is a 'team' weapon designed for gunner/loader gameplay.
Sure you can one man it but then your reload time is extremely high.
Instantaneous reload to basically become a heavy emplacement rivalling the response time of the automated turrets is the benefit of a team weapon. With lower risk of friendly fine since turrets absolutely do NOT check their fire.
@@juminleeI feel like (mainly being the loader and not using the spear often), that the recoilless is even better than the Spear (where you can hold the fire key to immediately fire when ready) for team reload because it can fire as quickly as the reload, without the aim delaying rate of fire. it also works against close enemies, enemies with obstructed line of sight and enemies further than 400m, AND it can actually shoot down dropships effectively because it can shoot immediately (quasar has charge-up time and EAT needs to be picked up or it’s barrel extended when switching to it), and reliably (those only take damage on the engines, meanwhile Spear shoots them in the middle. this fine-tuning also works against bile-titans, of which the head is only hit with the Spear if it’s facing you)
the RR fires as fast as the delay between the dropships is on bot drops, allowing the AT team to destroy the entire bot drop single-handedly (including the dropships dropping factory striders, taking only one shot to down it, compared to the many of the Spear, and the Spear being wonky in eg hitting a charger beast three times on the head recently instead of killing it in one, like the recoilless does, makes me wonder what, apart from skill issue, makes people choose the RR over the recoilless)
I almost solely play with people I can team reload, like the rate of fire is insane
I wouldn't blame you, the spear has been broken for so long that it wouldn't shock me if someone didn't know it was even a weapon in the game
If everyone splits up, you're going to have patrols more often and someone will always get the suck with 4 patrol spawns
The game has several mechanics that reward teamwork without forcing it down player's throats. Reinforcements come from teamates, the way spawns work makes things easier to stay together, or at least in pairs, buddy doors, and team weapons are, while under utilized, actually very powerful. Things like the supply pack and complementary loadouts also help too. They did a good job, they don't need to force teamwork, they chose the carrot instead of the stick and it shows. Most teams I play with, even randoms, are more than happy to operate as a group, move on agreed upon objectives, etc.
Helldivers 2 did not fail to emphasize teamwork. The problem has, and always was, the player mentality! Too many players want to play "Who gets the most kills!" Look at all the loadouts, and you'll see a bunch of Eagle and Orbitals galore. You'll see them mark every red ping on the minimap and bee-line straight for them. Right past the main objectives. They're the ones who can't help themselves dropping that last bomb at extraction, just to rack up a few more kills.
THIS IS THE PROBLEM! And this is how most players are. Especially pc players. COD is plagued with hackers cheating their way to the highest kill counts and is a prime example of this. No matter what coop game you play, you'll rarely find true coop players as they are small minority. I've played hundreds of missions already as a support role, and I can tell you, I rarely see teams stick together. There's always the killer, the sample hunter, and the completionist. All heading in different directions. I usually follow the guy heading for objectives to help them out.
The best games are always the teamwork games. But in the end, you can't force "teamwork" to those who don't give a dam. And that's probably 90% of the players.
True coop players are a rare breed, but they're the best.
The problem with the "eagles and orbitals" complaint is that if I am the team's only anti-tank player and I die then suddenly nobody can stop the chargers, bile titans, hulks, or factory striders. It is more practical for every team member to run a little bit of everything in case one of us dies, so we don't lose out on one aspect of firepower.
And since you mentioned extraction bombs, I'll add this:
I drop bombs at the end of extraction because I like the idea of flying away from explosions like we're in an action movie, thankyouverymuch!
@Keyce0013 I'm not complaining about the strategems, I'm only complaining about something that really can't be fixed. And that's the player mentality. Most players actually carry a bunch of anti-tank stratagems, 500KG being the biggest use.
I'm also not entirely complaining against dropping the bombs at extraction. It's to those idiots who drop them recklessly with little to no regard for their teammates' whereabouts. I've gotten killed multiple times from idiots doing this. The worst was one where the player dropped a 330 bomb, which has a huge scatter, gets in the Pelican, and I was over 30 meters away. By the time I reached 5 feet from the Pelican's doors, it killed me. There was literally no reason to drop it. No enemies around. I cussed him out at the end of match.
This is the main reason why I try to carry the super samples or majority of samples at the extraction. I'll wait for everyone to board, then I'll enter. If they drop a bomb...well then, they lose everything I was carrying. Lol.
@@Cipher73 As a fellow 380 enjoyer I am so sorry you had to deal with that. I've had my fair share of trying to huck that thing at the enemy's spawn spot only to get knocked down and dropped it at my feet (near extraction). Oops.
In terms of the anti-tank thing, that's mostly a practicality problem. It's just not a good idea to leave the anti-tank stratagems to one or two people, because if they are dead you have no means of dealing with a significant threat. I've done this once or twice (usually by accident and not thinking clearly), and it's annoying being chased by an enemy and not being able to do anything about it but run away all the time.
@Keyce0013 no worries about that. The guy who threw it definitely did not drop it, but I highly doubt he knew how big of a scatter that bombardment was. He was reckless with it.
In regards to the anti-tank, I think you're just referring to the EATS, Spear, or Recoilless. I was actually just thinking of anything that can kill a bile or walker. And that included all the bombs like Eagle Airstrikes, Orbital Railcannon, 500KG, Orbital Lasers. I pretty much see at least one of these on almost everyone's loadout. Mine are usually Eagle Airstrikes and Autocannon Sentry for all walkers, and Orbital Railcannon/ Autocannon Sentry for Biles and Chargers. I stun Chargers and kill with my HMG when I can. Hulks are easy kills.
@@Cipher73 I consider any stratagem that can take down a charger, BT, hulk, or factory strider to be anti-tank. I typically run around with the autocannon support weapon, but I'll also throw in an Eagle Airstrike, 380/Walking Barrage (for bots), 500kg/Precision Orbital, etc. I might swap to EAT-17s on the tower-defense missions but only because it makes that thing way easier when you can kill an entire group of enemies by shooting them out of the sky. I rarely run with the Spear and never use the Recoilless.
If I'm up against chargers I will usually go for whatever support weapon I've got (either AC or HMG), but since I also run the Scorcher as my primary, it can handle 1-2 of them with few issues.
Yeah, outside of assisted reloading the only thing that actually requires a teammate is the bunkers. We had an update that made the Rely Tower side objective more solo friendly but it is nice when there's objectives that have more than one step that's away from a terminal and you have a buddy to do them. What the game needs to promote teamwork is vehicles that require a driver and a gunner, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're never picked because it ends up being better just to run around on foot or if they also give us a bike with guns that a solo person can use.
There are also times when my team of randos and I are silently and mindlessly in sync
8:09 "There isn't any benefit gained from multiple team members being present in one location"
False. The game spawns fewer enemies when players are grouped together, as the number of patrols dropped onto the map at any given spawn time is based on the number of "player groups" on the map (a group being defined as players within 75m of each other). If all four players are spread apart, you have 4 groups (and 4 patrols spawn); if they're all together, you have only 1 group (and only 1 patrol spawns). You literally benefit from having to face fewer enemies if you're all in one location.
This is mathematically correct but with proper handling is essentially meaningless. If I run off by myself then any patrols that do manage to kill me don't impact your own play performance. As long as I am sufficiently skilled I can either wipe out or avoid any patrols that come my way and still complete more objectives, faster, than my 3 teammates who are all working together.
The benefit would be only 1 player would face the reinforcements. The rest can stealth the patrols and clear out objectives without much pressure
Right. And, additionally, engaging enemies isn't a free action; you're expending resources anytime you get into a fight. On a good day, you can often remain self-sufficient by hitting minor points of interest along the way. The tables can turn though, and you can suddenly find yourself having to choose between having to disengage and rejoin the group, or calling in the Resupply to extend...but starving the rest of your team in the process.
@@ASFalcon13 I am usually in a good enough position to rarely run out of ammunition, especially since I use the Scorcher which deals a small amount of AoE damage to whatever it hits, so I am almost never dealing 0 damage from deflections. I will also consider using resupply depending on what my teammates are doing. If I am noticing that they are dying a lot, I won't feel as bad because they'll be coming back into the fight with more ammo (or full if using the right booster).
Worst case scenario, I run away. I am always cognizant of my map and where nearby patrols are so I am not frequently caught between two pulls.
8:00 "Never engage in a fight unless you need to."
The copious use of Sonic OSTs makes me smile
I think you conveniently forgot the priority citizen evacuation missions
I don't want to remember those missions in the first place, I have such bad memories of them. Mission Bugs, bot spawn rates, DCs - it's all PTSD. I hate those missions, easily my least favourite by far.
@@G1beonGames but they are meant for teams to actively cooperate to complete
Regarding your thoughts on Mission objectives -
I remember reading that both engaging objectives and staying in one place/zone gradually boosts enemy spawnrates.
Do you consider this to motivate at least part of your team to stand and protect the "terminal-dude" or how's your reasoning in this case?
You know, I think you're right. There is not a lot that hell diver does for teamwork. but man, when my team of randos works together, helping each other, is the best match of all.
meanwhile an unbeatable strat is one homie bringing Autocannon, and the other brings supply pack, switch backpacks and now you have an auto that reloads 8x faster, has 12x the ammo. and a pocket homie.
Great video - I think your commentary and analysis would be perfect for implementing with randoms.
It’s weird, I have either excellent teamwork with randoms and missions that feel easy, or I have missions with randoms where there’s no leadership/direction, and everyone goes off in different directions and it’s more likely people die.
I think a lot of that is to do with people prioritising different objectives.
Some people are running off getting samples, some people are doing side objectives, some wanna go for a full clear.
Maybe a brief voting system while getting fired out the ship in the hellpods as to what you, the player is wanting to prioritise would be a cool idea!
Can’t always rely on the text chat, and if you’re like me - I’m too shy and socially awkward to use a mic with people I don’t know!
So a voting system would be cool.
I think going off in pairs is a really good idea especially when going for a full clear.
People have been asking for an easier team reload for months! Feel like it should be an immediate prompt once your team mate with a backpack weapon needs a reload - with an ‘x’ button prompt.
Similar to how you can stim.
Also having buffs like ‘morale’ that increase your speed or resilience when you’re within certain meter of a team mate would be cool.
If all 4 are together you could get a 4x multiplier for a certain amount of time - which would make extraction more exciting when getting overrun by bots or bugs!!
I think team work is fine for the most part as weapons can be used cooperatively, certain load outs compliment each other and you just generally have a higher survival rate as a group. When you’re not team killing each other anyway. My only teammate issue is when you have players sprinting to every objective leaving aggro enemies in their wake for teammates to wade through.
In brief, IMO:
1. They can't add the buddy system without a compatible backpack, because it'd conflict with stimming/resupplying via supply pack. And programming it would need either a new keybind or a complete overhaul. I'm against hold & toggle, as I feel like it'd pose a hindrance or wouldn't feel like a comfortable option for players.
2. The camera was switched while keeping the same general but significant game mechanics as well as changing your point of teamwork. The most likely solution is a redefinition of the gameplay loop to adjust to the new camera, but legally, people would end up with a completely different game, again.
3. The mission objectives mostly compel you to stay in one place, while the enemies compel you to keep moving, as "you're not supposed to stay, fight and kill everything" (a sentence I'm tired of, but whatever) . Either the objective could keep the player moving, or they should be allowed to stay and fight on it.
The game encourages teamwork, it just doesn’t force it. The alternative would be like the rubber banding or the blue shell in Mario Cart. It keeps the races close and you get the experience the devs want but it is frustrating. Much better to find good people to play with than be forced to play a certain way.
Helldivers 1 has a downed state when your health goes to 0. You press a button repeatedly to get back up or a teammate can one tap you. I hope they bring this back in the form of a ship upgrade or something. This mechanic does encourage you to stick together. That said, I also think being able to play however you want and not being restricted to sticking together is a welcome change
Last night someone shot and killed our galactic commander, on purpose....so we beat him to death. Teamwork makes the dreams work.
I think that the map kinda does force you to stick to your team because when you split from your team on automaton missions and are you not a pro player you die pretty fast
This right here. Especially at higher difficulty levels, you can definitely feel a difference between a cohesive team and four players running around doing their own thing. The video makes a whole big deal about how the camera is the big thing here...but seriously, if a player has a problem understanding the basic concept of why 4 guns coordinated and aimed at a single target is more effective than 4 single guns aimed at 4 separate targets, then I honestly can't help you.
I agree 100%
Splitting teams you split firepower. I've seen people struggle a lot more on their own (on higher difficulties mind you), especially running jack of all trades loadouts that turn out to be anemic most of the time, while duos or trios steamroll the map without much effort.
Plus usually people is stuck bringing out generalist loadouts because most of the time you can't rely on a random doing its job.
I often get stuck holding a bugbreach down with a stickle and napalm airstrikes because I brought the spear and the flamethrower guy ran off somewhere to die alone.
And it would be cool to do the team reload with out losing a backpack. When you do it well it's actually worth it. But here the problem it's still the players. And to do it you need to be a full team, if you're a duo you can't afford it.
Me personally, I solo near half of the map while my teammates take the other half.
We get the map cleared within 25 minutes and left by 30.
Hell, we'd clear the entire map in blitz as well, but might ignore some POIs to extract earlier.
It's too repetitive to role play as a squad with that big of a map to cover.
If I can get by running solo and finish the game faster, I will 10/10.
Unfortunately, having someone following me is a liability usually.
Drawing aggro because they are not using the stealth armor, throwing strategems sealing off escape/forward routes
Or worse, reinforcing me back to a fight I am actively trying to run away from.
I am not rewarded for every kills, and those POIs will not clear themselves.
Fights just take too long to finish too sometimes. Might have to even spend an orbital laser on it if it escalates...
Ideas to make the game more teamwork friendly?
1. Have the objectives in a "single file" (L4D style) with little detours for POIs or covers.
2. Buff shield generators to recharge after shield breaks for a duration.
3. Bring back the ANGEL, ally aoe healing/repair backpack
4. Give mech suit more survivalibity
5. Buff heavy and medium armor to tank more damage damnit
6. Have an objective to have an area as big as evacuation base.
Currently the objectives are in a small area and doesn't need players to work together to complete most of them.
(Think of the petrol-> vehicle objectives in L4D, where a huge section of the map is for that one objective)
7. Transport vehicles to travel through the goddamned empty space.
This game is a glorified running simulator. Guns are my mops and strategems are tools to throw at problems.
Basically, it's not very viable to stick together during fights. Whenever a fight broke out, everyone need to disperse and survive in their own corner.
As long as we can focus less on hiding and running, and more on actually gunning the enemies down, sticking together would make more sense.
As for right now, sticking right next to one another like in the trailers are not possible during fights.
People will disperse and maybe even run off to do something else.
Extra info, I play only on helldives with randoms. Players on this difficulty are mostly relatively competent in surviving and clearing objectives.
Playing on lower difficulties is actually much harder with players wasting reinforcements on teamkills and aggroing the enemies next planet over.
Also probably have to carry the mission more and clear the bases and POIs myself, since they will have to ignore those with only 3 reinforcements left..
Even on Helldive I often see players throw away their reinforcements while I go off and clear a good chunk of the map with only a Scorcher and an Autocannon (not including other stratagems).
A simple way to encourage sticking together might be to increase the mission length but decrease the number of reinforcements. Separated players are more likely to be killed due to lack of support, so you'd be encouraged to stick together but have time to complete all objectives if you keep up the pace. The problem is youd still get randos running off and draining your reinforcements very quickly
Another thing from helldivers 1 they could potentially consider is the revive option when hit with less critical attacks. could keep the team close enough to each to help each other back up.
On the harder difficulties, teamwork is absolutely important. While one person is working on the objective, the other players provide cover fire and stratagems. Whenever you’re trying to complete a mission objective enemies start coming in hot and your squad mates are critical to keeping you alive.
After completing the mission, that’s when I go around to the side objectives and we spread out on our own or go in pairs. Typically, when players do what you’re saying where they just run around to different objectives it’s very frustrating and difficult to complete a mission without dying and losing samples or weapons.
The assisted reload issue is true, but I think that might be more like the exception than the rule. On easy difficulties, it’s simple for the match to be every man for himself but again once you start getting up into the higher difficulties, it is suicide to attempt almost anything by yourself. You have to have cover fire from your squad or nobody wins or your mission rating ends up being trash since everyone died so many times.
Playing with Randos is always an issue in ANY game.
Story time: i was using a build that doesnt require a backpack. I saw my teammate who uses an autocannon leave an empty pack behind so i grabbed it and was refilling it as i picked up ammo. Then at extraction i gave em a reload and we were able to hold a line against a wall of bile titans on helldive. Working together may not be your first instinct, but that decreased reload time is worth it in the right setting.
There was a mechanic to where you got more bug breaches/bot drops when you left a certain radius of your team mates. However this hurt solo divers that would get a constant stream of patrols so they removed it.
It wasn't the bug breaches or bot drops themselves but it was the case that more roaming patrols would spawn around solo players, which meant that they had no time to rest between one bug breach or bot drop and the next one. 1-2 groups of wandering enemies would spawn nearby and walk right into the battle, which would in turn make them active participants in the fight. Those same wandering patrols could spawn in any direction and since they are directed upon spawn-in to wander towards you (not necessarily directly but nearby), you could and often would end up with instances where you'd duck behind cover to get a breather from one patrol + breach/drop combo and suddenly get ambushed by something behind you.
If you were both lucky and good enough, the best case scenario was that you would have a massive horde of bots or bugs chasing you with more randomly appearing on all sides, or you'd die and get air-dropped into the middle of the swarm of enemies because the game's solo-drop design isn't that good.
@@Keyce0013 oh I didn't know it was like that. Was that happening because one player couldn't kill the enemies fast enough?
@@fallingfloor6924 Yeah. More enemies would spawn in than you had bullets or missiles for, so solo players would be forced to spend the entire map trying to run away while also picking up anything that happened to be nearby. Even if they managed to sneak past a patrol group it would get aggro'd anyways because of the bots or bugs already shooting/chasing the player.
The other part of the problem was an unintended bug by the devs. This bug caused patrols to spawn as if there were 4 players in the match, even if there were less than that.
Imagine being a new player who doesn't even have access to 4 stratagems yet (or even good guns) and every single mission you play is just you running away from more bugs or bots than you can handle, and not actually doing the mission objectives. Because you're new and inexperienced and probably don't want to get laughed at by better players in quickmatch, your new player experience is just spending 12-40 minutes every single game slowly dying to missiles or acid spit.
Apparently turning an autocannon into a FUCKING ONE SHOTTING MACHINE GUN isn't good enough. :(
the recoilless is best for buddy reloading tbh, because you can mark enemies and know when your buddy will shoot to be there in support, while the autocannon only needs reload once every few shots (most use it semi-auto)
like when I see a charger, I run to my teammate with the recoilless
whether the autocannon due uses it or not, however, isn’t that easy to know
I think the way to fix assisted reload is to simply make it so the assisting diver doesn't need the backpack.
Team-reloading was what drew me to the game since the idea of helping out your teammates in a fight sounded great, the implementation however is so ass backwards that it actively detracts people from using it, it only happens "naturally" when two people are running the same support weapons and even if you face an enemy that requires you to team-reload you're better off both shooting it than to use it
Their own design philosophy of making us rely on strategems instead of our weapons reinforces this, why bother even coordinate with teammates to team-reload for such minimal gains when you can all just drop Airstrikes and call it a day
the hidden enemy composition reinforces the "Swiss army knife" mentality since you can't be the dedicated "Chaff killer" of the team if you get something like a Bile Spewer seed
The hidden POIs don't help, people want the samples, medals and Super Credits, making the hidden just reinforces people to wander around unless you get lucky and find a Radar early on
If we stuck together and rotated around the map, it’d take at least twice as long to clear the map. Also the waves of enemies if not fully cleared while holding a tight position, otherwise will cause this unintended endless grind. The entire team needs to be committed to clearing otherwise there’s no rest periods, as it should be.
The armor selection itself already determines the pace of the game. If the entire team is in heavy, we’re not going for a full clear of the map which means less samples or if cleared it’ll be close to 50 minutes.
Well I have a small thing to say. What about the game's design for father away teamwork options? I mean if staying close together isn't good then what about keeping away from each other and pointing to points where you can ambush?
playing in pairs seems to be the bets strategy, atleast in my opinion
you have enough total ground coverage between the 2 teams, but each pair has enough firepower to deal with any problem they face
dying also means your buddy just calls you back in where you were, instead of a teammate calling you in on the other end of the map.
When you find a food team, you play exactly like the marketing shows, and that is the most Helldivers experience you can get from the game, play as a synchronized team without the need of any communication, jyst flowing with them while you comolete all the missions like nothing
I don't understand this. Even with randoms they always understand the objective at the least. Sometimes you'll have the occasional bad player but that's with any coop game. Most of the time players stick together, A lot I see people running anti-tank and crowd clearing weapons. I even go into chat and ask randoms for backpacks to help them reload.
Ya, this is a co-op game if you want it to be. I always play with randoms, and I have no issue enjoying the loose o-op mechanism in this game, and I'm pretty sure my teammates enjoyed it too
So holding Veren Wells gives a liberation bonus on the bot front right? What if there was a similar bonus when close to one or more divers?
No punishment for going solo but being in proximity to the team could give a 5% boost to reload speed/damage negation/accuracy
Here are some ideas: add enemies that pin you down, similar to the special infected in Left 4 Dead, requiring someone or something to kill it or knock it off of you to free you. While this wouldn't force players to stick together, it would make it a heck of a lot smarter to at least go in pairs
Increase the time limit on harder difficulties. It's so easy to get bogged down into a loop of reinforcement call-ins with no way out, especially when detector towers are involved. I think that the breach/drop system needs reworking in general, but that's a topic for another day
Add more objectives that take longer to complete without your squad present. For example: multiple divers logging into a terminal and standing nearby can increase how quickly data gets transferred, or manually hold open some valves to fuel an ICBM faster. However, this shouldn't harm solo players (since your whole squad crashing at once is still a serious issue)
I'm not a huge fan of the idea of pin-down mechanics (because if it's on bugs they're already bad enough with hunters packs leaping on you to death), but I 100% agree on having more teammwork mechanics. Make the oil collection mission have 2 terminals that operate different sections of the pipe-laying puzzle.
Change the SEAF Artillery objective to let it get loaded without blocking the rest of the tasks from being completed on the terminal. That one change alone would make it feel more like a cooperative objective because while my friends are looking for the best shells to load into the weapon I could be at the terminal getting its arming and aiming software ready.
swear this guy sounds like Memeio just without the bass in the mic
Also would not be opposed to a backpack only call in option at like half the amount of time similar to an eagle rearm effect simply to get more ammo or give to a teammate that had a back packless weapon.
Call it rushed rearm and give half a pack of ammo.
I once got reinforced far away from my previous gear. My Reconciles Rifle was on cooldown, but I found this Spear backpack with one round. No clue where the Spear was. I found my teammate with the Spear, i picked up a few ammo packs along the way, which gave me 3 rounds. I followed him around and reloaded him until I ran out.
They should do like Fatshark's Warhammer games and have an aura of about 50m that the more squad mates in the aura the bigger boost of the more buffs. So it could be called a Morale boost and allow every member in the aura to gain one buff of 5% damage/stamina recovery/reload speed/health regen up to a total of 20%, player chooses which single buff they want on ship. 11:31 Or you can do 5-10% of each buff, 1 other person with you 10% damage buff, 2 people with you 10% damage and reload speed buff, 3 with you get 10% damage, reload speed and damage reduction buff etc
A well coordinated team will perform better. Not just with assisted reloads and such but with flanking, covering fire, etc. i think the weak spot on hulks is a good opportunity for teamwork
Oh well, combining strategems, enfilade/defilade, overwatch actions, flanking maneuvers, baiting an enemy patrols, support play and more isn't supported by HD2 game design... Totally agree if you doesn't want to do it. The game design doesn't force teamwork but encourages it. Team reloads is a god-tier when you got better communication and understand what you're doing:
- not sticking to a player but staying near and assisting only for reload(not like you've shown, most of the assisted reloads doesn't require your constant engagement with first player especially spear given it's targeting time),
- doing it only when you need it(many heavy enemies need one AT shot, and team reload is needed when you want to delete this gunship patrol from the sky in a mere seconds or any other heavy like a bile titan),
- choosing the right position to do it(if you going for anti-air make sure that you got yourself a nice enclosed position, if for anti-tank get those flanks covered by some rock or building).
Most heavy enemies, especially on the bot side has a rear weak spot aka heat vent. That encourages teamwork as one player baits the target and other shoots the vent/chargers butt.
Many enemies has narrow cone of view to allow players flanking maneuvers.
There is a controlled reinforcement drop onto enemies by another player to deal damage.
There is a secret for the team reload. I used to feel the same way as you about team reload until I figured out the trick. Now that I know what you're supposed to do I don't want them to change it. It's very viable and massively powerful especially if you have a team member with a supply pack. Reloading your backpack while you reload your friend's auto Cannon rocket launcher or spear. I'll give you a hint. You don't need to do a backpack switcheroo with your teammate
Okay, that music makes me think Trigun
Finally someone actually talking about this (agreeing with OhDough I tihnk hes beening saying this for ages). I was watching a video saying how to support your teamates with the spear its a complete waste of ur time and if ur caught alone with an enemy reinforments ur screwed and its just silly its so fucking annoying when I see people saying holding hands is the only way to play, this is why they removed the Retreive Essential Personnel (thanks alot to the people who complained you just got a free sample farm mission removed that mission was exremly easy if u played it right 2 and 2 or 1 and 3 i even completed it with 3 off of obj btws) the ONLY actual OBJ that requires teamwork is the Bunker which is easily solved with 2 and 2 or even better just ignore the damn bunker and focus on mission.
Helldivers 2 should never be played as a 4 man squad single entity.
It's not useless at all though. It just requires knowing the person you are playing with
Everything youre saying makes sense, but i think the number 1 issue is lack of microphones
If everyone was more interested in voice chat, communication and teamwork would go way up
I think the type of community Helldivers 2 has is comparable to the supportiveness and teamwork encouraged community of Warframe. Anything the game lacks in instructions is passed onto newer players by those who have already been playing for sometime and I am all for that.
Solution: cram the players into a small box on the screen.
Problem solved👍
Damn, what an incredible solution. I don't even want to think about how that would affect the game, especially with the third person camera
I believe Helldivers 2 just need to design missions that can be made faster while having more people and about the backpack being able to be used with the gun's user backpack, (as being said in the video).
Because (that is my opinion, but IDK if that is the case), it seems they are designing it as someone doing the mission objective while everyone else (if they are grouped together or in pair) being guards in the case there is an attack.
That would encorage some teamwork (seeing the other comments, is not that there is no teamwork, but is not encoraged) without removing the freedom of being able to do things solo, as well, lets face it, there are times that you don't want to go with random players and your friends are not available or you just want to have your solo time in the game.
Enemy spawn rates increase when players split up. This mechanic encourages teamwork through punishing independence. No one seems to be aware of it
When Bob is off shoving samples in his pocket and Joe is taking out every outpost on the map, they may feel like a couple of Rambo's "doing what has to be done" but meanwhile player 3 & 4 may be faced with 3x the enemies the difficulty level demands
People make whole videos but never ever would think of taking no support stratagem, using a mates support weapon after the first cooldown and being able to assist reload without "foregoing a 1/4th of helldivers powerbudget".
Teamwork starts in the loadout screen
It's clear I won't platinum this game cause the trophies require circumstances and inefficiency to unlock them
I usually split from the team to do the opposite of the map.clearing both main and side objectives on that part with less aggro than a tandem. But if there is a new to the helldive level. I stuck with the group and just split to do the remaining side objective at the far side while they wait at extraction and just in case I fail,they could just reinforce me and extract
It would be controversial but had they set a limited range on the boosters, that could have been enough to get players to stick together more. However, as it stands, the game is very much so a choose your own strategy where multiple ways to play are viable.
i’m subbing bc u used sonic music in a helldivers video, my autism says ur a cool dude
I think your critique is fair. How would you tweak the design in the case of helldivers 2 to foster teamwork? You mentioned not requiring a backpack on the assistant for assisted reloads. What else?
helldivers 2 players do solo on some mission but its not the mass. i play on higher difficulty with random guys and its mostly in 2 groups or as one group
what if helmets had an ability where you get a boost the more players stayed together. like a radar boost to see more enemies on the map. a vision boost in snowstorms with echo pings. damage boost. pinging an enemy lovers defense depending on how many ping it..
Honestly, a tank could be the best teamwork vehicle. Need four players to drive, reload, aim and shoot, and an LMG on top.
A very strong vehicle which only reaches that potential with a full team.
Half the fun (?) of this game is the balance of strats that add to the team vs. strats that you need bc your team makes you sad.
I honestly find the teamwork pretty well done, with friends ironically its impossible, but I played with randoms that made the teamwork just click, and its fascinating, although in diff 9/8/maybe 7 its impossible, the bots are gonna throw you, and the bugs are gonna make you run away from the team
I think if drop cooldowns were localized instead of shared map-wide it would make running off on your own less viable
I'm sorry man, ive played DRG, vermintide 2, the division, and helldivers 2 and i can confidently say helldivers 2's teamwork is the best. At higher difficulties you just cant beat the game without working together and working together in a well-oiled manner. We split off into teams of two to clear the map and complete objectives, we design the team's loadout and roles together, and tackle the whole map as one unit. 400 hours of play and i can tell you that its all about teamwork and the game is an excellent platform for it. You just need to find the right people and dive with them.
That works great if you have friends to play with but when just playing with randoms everyone just does their own thing. Even in Helldive. Sure you might stay loosely together but you don't really interact with your teammates often. This is not the case in DRG where even randoms work together.
Sure! Here's my suggestion though. I only have so many friends who will play, so I started mic-ing up and I've already made like half a dozen buddies from random matches! One is also a vet and turns out he lives like an hour away lol. So that'll probably be a drinking buddy too 😂
Really though, if you haven't tried, please do! Good feels all around when you find people that click with you. @@achillesa5894
The teamwork is necessary when you drop slightly above your skill level, which is also when the game is (arguably) most fun.
The point about friends is that the in-game friend system is there to mitigate that problem.
You have to drop with randoms for awhile, but if you friend the people that use teamwork you can build a network of people to play with… when the system is working.
Its not perfect, but it can help.
I’d suggest not looking for friends on helldive because people playing helldive either have a team, don’t need a team, or are so far over their head that you are unlikely to be able to join them before they fail the mission.
Try around difficulty 4-6, where players are starting to feel the difficulty ramp up and may not be experts at all the mechanics yet.
People playing just slightly above their skill level make great teammates because they need to use teamwork to survive, and newer players may be more open to taking advice and changing playstyle to accommodate teamwork.
Personally, I friend anyone who uses their microphone and isnt toxic. And a few who use teamwork without microphones.
I find one in roughly 3/10 to 4/10 games played with randoms, but that number can feel skewed if you play the whole operation with people that do not talk/communicate. If you are trying to find people to play with, consider joining other peoples games, hopping around between missions instead of hosting.