Players aren’t taking the Helldivers 2 Escalation of Freedom update too well. While concurrent numbers are rising and the new content is proving popular, the community isn’t keen on the big Breaker Incindiary changes and general nerfs. With so many people flocking back to the game, the Helldivers 2 Steam reviews have taken their biggest hit since the PSN fiasco. Not all is lost, though, as Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani promises fine-tuning across the board once the dust has settled.
Helldivers 2 Escalation of Freedom is the shot in the arm the shooter desperately needs. There are new enemies, objectives, biomes, and an even harder difficulty to test your skills. The long-rumored third faction of The Illuminate is still nowhere to be found, but players are flocking back to give the new content a try.
While Escalation of Freedom is going down well, the co-op game‘s nerfs aren’t. Helldivers 2 players have written the most negative Steam reviews for the game since the PSN fiasco earlier this year. Since Escalation of Freedom dropped players have written nearly 1,000 negative reviews, while the PSN account issue drew over 220,000. It’s only a fraction, sure, but player sentiment emphasizes a distaste for the most recent nerfs.
Arrowhead’s biggest – and most disliked – nerf is on the SG-225IE Breaker Incendiary. It quickly became the meta weapon for dealing with Terminids, so the developer upped the recoil and reduced the maximum number of magazines.
“The Incendiary Breaker was like 30% of all Terminid sessions at some point,” Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani writes on Discord. “[It is] very much a meta gun. Is that a problem? Yes. Is it a big one? I don’t know. We’ll discuss it.”
Arrowhead has nerfed even more in the Escalation of Freedom patch, too. The Slugger now has more stagger force and spread, and the grenade pistol has a smaller ammo capacity. There are some buffs, like the Guard Dog magazines going from six to eight and the HE barrage cooldown getting a decrease, but the nerfs are players’ main concern.
“‘It is a good update but the nerfs are dumb’. Is that the summary?” Jorjani ponders on Discord. “Or is there more nuance?”
“The developers seem to think that nerfing everything is the way to go, despite it being a PvE co-op game,” one new Steam review says. “Continuous unnecessary nerfs after multiple patches, many frustrating enemy types and mechanics, [a] massive backlog of bugs that remain since the launch of the game,” another adds.
The huge Escalation of Freedom update isn’t all that’s coming to the game, though, as the next Helldivers 2 Warbond, Freedom’s Flame, is arriving on Thursday August 8, bringing new capes, weapons, armor, and emotes.
If you’re jumping back in alongside the Escalation of Freedom update, we’ve put together all the best Helldivers 2 stratagems, Helldivers 2 weapons, and Helldivers 2 armor sets to give you an edge.
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