Why undocumented patch notes should be the norm for Helldivers 2

No dawdling here: Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Games should continue hiding and obfuscating key game information as its live-service production pipeline goes on. Do the Terminids now fly? Do you trust your own eyes, ears, and dead Helldivers? Of course not! And that’s how it should be.

Let’s take a small step back first, though. The modern gaming media industry is positively inundated with meta-gaming and content strategizing: you can find a dozen expert (or “expert,” as it were) content creators discussing the ins and outs of the latest piece of content within a stone’s throw of any remotely popular release. Avoiding this is not feasible, and Helldivers 2’s popularity means your family, friends, and pets all want to know what the latest meta is now that the Railgun sucks.

I kid, of course, as a game community’s hyper-focusing on the most potent theoretical loadout is a can of worms I’m not eager to open anytime soon. One topic that sits adjacent to such meta-gaming attempts, however, is secret hunting, and the two subjects overlap to a massive extent.

Helldivers 2 is better when players discover changes on their own

It’s virtually impossible for a game developer to keep a secret in this day and age. Players are hungry for information on what’s coming to a game next, especially in the live-service context, and all it takes is a small hint, leak, data mine, or suggestion that something new is dropping in before people take this information and sprint with it into the sunset. That, in all honesty, is one of the things missing from modern Destiny, where everything is a known quantity and even the most dedicated of secret hunters haven’t got much to go on.

At some point in time, the tentative balance between wanting to know more about a game you’re playing and having ready access to everything there is to know about it shifted far too heavily towards the latter. And so, we now generally do know everything. Except in the case of Helldivers 2.

Since the game came out just over a month ago, Arrowhead has successfully surprised the community multiple times over in the most unlikely of places. Take the sudden appearance of driveable mecha, for example, or the surprise pop-up of those flying murder-pests. Or, for example, the way the Automatons pivoted their entire war campaign in an unexpected direction. Or the fact that Joel is turning the knobs of war as the community progresses. You get the point. Helldivers 2 is loaded with surprises, and this simply isn’t something we should be taking for granted.

Make no mistake, community members and content creators absolutely are disseminating leaked and datamined information in select circles. It’s not even all that difficult to find it if you are so inclined! The interesting bit, though, is that Arrowhead has successfully cultivated a situation where knowing all the bits and bobs of Helldivers 2’s game files isn’t enough to understand what the game’s next outcome might be.

Sure, we did know the mecha were coming well ahead of time, but we had no idea when and how to expect them. We’ve even seen the flying Terminid creatures on some of Helldivers 2’s most prominent marketing materials, but who could’ve expected they’d start appearing as Super Earth mounted its large-scale Termicide operations?

Context matters a great deal, is what I’m getting at. Simply being aware of a game’s upcoming pieces of content does nothing to contextualize them in the broader sense of its progression, and Arrowhead has been handling this whole thing remarkably well so far.

This brings us to our starting argument at last: undocumented patch notes should be the baseline for Helldivers 2, yes, but only where it makes sense. The last thing we want is for the developer to revamp how, say, a popular weapon behaves in moment-to-moment gameplay without letting us know. We should hope, however, that Arrowhead continues to pack in surprises without immediately outlining them.

A clear and pointed distinction needs to be made between balancing changes and the addition of all-new content. The former should be revealed, explained, and afforded to the community wherever possible. The latter, on the other hand, should not.

Had Arrowhead been more direct and obvious in what it was doing with Helldivers 2, the community wouldn’t be speaking about the ongoing tremors on certain planets in hushed tones. We wouldn’t be discussing what other Helldivers content might make its way into Helldivers 2 in the near and far future, either. Some amount of secrecy and playful obfuscation is healthy for live-service games, and Helldivers 2 needs to keep leveraging its surprising approach to the matter for the foreseeable future.

Helldivers 2 patch notes are need to know, and Super Earth doesn’t need you to know

In this sense, the only way forward is for Arrowhead to continue releasing partial, incomplete patch notes, and the community feels that way as well. At the same time, it is equally crucial that Arrowhead also reveals more of the backend statistical information about the weapons’ functionality and behavior, for example. As per the CEO himself, Helldivers 2 features roughly 50 different weapon stats while only displaying a mere four of them to the player in-game. One could easily argue that this is totally unacceptable and that such information should be shared plainly and referenced in patch notes wherever applicable.

Though Arrowhead has handled this well enough so far, the studio’s track record isn’t entirely blemish-free. It’s not a huge deal, granted, but players have surely noticed by now just how big of a deal environmental events such as firestorms and meteor showers are in gameplay terms. These weren’t a surprise, sadly: Arrowhead specifically pointed out that environmental situations were being brought into the game as part of Helldivers 2’s first balancing pass.

So, a bit of a missed opportunity there. It’s not a major fault, but it does suggest that Arrowhead itself isn’t yet entirely sure what information needs to be shared with the community and what needs to be hidden away for players to discover of their own accord. It’ll be interesting to see how the situation develops over the coming months, too, as the studio’s idea of what to hide and what to share crystalizes further. There’s also the obvious question of whether this approach is something that Arrowhead can maintain for years down the line or if this is only the initial push to differentiate Helldivers 2 from everything else on the market.

Lots of questions, then, and only Arrowhead can properly answer them. Let’s see what other messes Super Earth stumbles its way into.