Helldivers 2 is by no means a ‘broken’ game. However, it seems as if it wouldn’t take too much more of a technical strain to bend it backward and tear a few ligaments, as was discussed in a response that Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt offered in a conversation on Reddit.
This response has been quite illuminating, saying a lot with a little, and suggests that a big UI overhaul could take place at some point in the future of Helldivers 2. How this would actually affect the game’s UI is undetermined, such as whether additional UI or quality-of-life features could be provided as a result of an improved system, but there are a few areas where a UI update or feature being reassessed could help streamline or reinforce Helldivers 2’s whole UX approach.
To be fair, an improved UI system might not necessarily imply that big UI overhauls would ensue, nor would there be any UI or quality-of-life features integrated as byproducts. Instead, the following wish list looks at a couple of areas where such an improvement could benefit the game’s existing UI/UX.
Helldivers 2’s New Major Order Undermines the Commemorative FOMO Cape
Helldivers 2's commemorative Battle of Super Earth cape is terrific, and yet it's hard to say that the Illuminates were overthrown conclusively.
Comprehensive Galactic War Table Lore
Helldivers 2’s Galactic War table is the world map players engage with whenever they select an enemy faction’s planet and choose which mission to either initiate or join. But, another function that may go unnoticed about the table is that it lightly references certain events players have experienced in the Celeste and Orion sectors:
- Meridia becoming the Meridian Black Hole in the wake of the Terminid Supercolony, vanquished by using the Dark Fluid.
- Ivis, Moradesh, and Angel’s Venture’s planetary fragments as “remains of [planets] torn apart by the Meridian singularity.”
Still, lore is not comprehensively detailed on this map, or at least not as much as it could be. For example, the Altus and Sol sectors’ glassed planets linger there for players who were around to bear witness to and reminisce on them, but new players will see them and be unaware of what occurred in order for Mars to be cooked.
Indeed, it was Helldivers 2’s Meridian singularity beelining its way toward Super Earth that wrought these planets’ ends, and that knowledge hasn’t yet been made apparent in the same vein as the lore descriptions given to Meridia, Ivis, Moradesh, and Angel’s Venture. Speaking of the War table map, it would be neat if more seemingly miscellaneous planets played larger roles, even subliminally or implicitly, based on what it boasts.
For instance, Turing resting near Terminid-occupied sectors gives much more narrative weight to the potential risk of jeopardizing Helldivers 2’s Xenoentomology Center. These are arguably nitpicks regarding UI updates that Arrowhead could bestow onto Helldivers 2, but they’d go a long way in making a more complete experience while parsing through available lore etched across the galaxy. If nothing else, Arrowhead’s proposed system improvements could make examining the War table more fluid and educational.
Warbond Completion Progress
Another corner that could take advantage of a UI system improvement may be Helldivers 2’s Premium Warbond menus. In particular, tabbing between Warbonds, the Superstore, and Super Credits isn’t a chore, but the two former pages aren’t exactly thorough or user-friendly in their current state, respectively.
For Warbonds, players can scroll through available ‘battle passes’ in-game easily enough, but knowing how many medals have been spent on each is debatably rather redundant information. Three bars indicate how many pages there are in each, too, but it might be more efficient to know how many total medals are needed for each page of a Warbond and how many players have spent toward that total. This way, players could tell if they’ve completed a Warbond wholly or not before they open it and take a look themselves.
For Helldivers 2’s Superstore, interacting with content supplied on each page is a rather buggy experience, where holding R2 to inspect an armor set, helmet, or cape will first send players to the next page, registering their input as wanting to swap to a subsequent page before inspecting the item that it lands on. Moreover, it may be more ideal if players were able to scroll between the daily rotation and permanent Warbond items as they do with Warbonds in the previous menu tab.
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Helldivers 2’s Democratic Exercises are Exclusive to Discord
Discord is something of an unofficial companion app for Helldivers 2, not unlike how it functions for many games’ communities who are either tight-knit or have the pleasure of direct player feedback and developer communications. In fact, Helldivers 2’s Discord is where players engaged with Station-81 Input and Output channels and the ARG ‘minigame,’ as well as where players voted on what to name a rebuilt Mega City, with players ultimately and hilariously electing to call it Gun.
The possible new names for the city that was originally called Remembrance were:
- New Remembrance
- Everlasting Memory
- Peacebeacon’s Bloodlight
- Winds of Change of Tides of War
- Gun
There are a few areas where a UI update or feature being reassessed could help streamline or reinforce Helldivers 2’s whole UX approach.
Helldivers 2 has no reason to uproot its democratic festivities from Discord and find a way to stuff it somewhere in-game, but there is an argument to be made about essentially needing to be active on the game’s Discord in order to not miss out on fun events.
Pilestedt’s response on Reddit seems to confidently state that Discord will continue to be a second home for the Helldivers 2 community, but perhaps an overhauled UI system could make it easier to integrate the two so that no player is left out. In the meantime, it’s more likely that an improved UI system could be a boon for the game’s performance, and it’ll be interesting to see what it might look like when Helldivers 2’s UI system is no longer “cumbersome.”
Helldivers 2
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 83 /100 Critics Rec: 91%
- Released
- February 8, 2024
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
- Arrowhead Game Studios, Nixxes
- Publisher(s)
- Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Publishing
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- bitsquid
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op
- Cross-Platform Play
- All platforms
- Franchise
- Helldivers
- Number of Players
- 1-4 players (online)
- Genre(s)
- Third-Person Shooter, Extraction Shooter, Action, Science Fiction
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
