Helldivers 2has done an excellent job setting itself apart from other competing PVE shooters, primarily due to its heavy focus on teamwork. Without a healthy dose of cooperation, a team will not make it to extraction, and that’s doubly true in the game’s harder difficulties like Impossible and Helldive. One of the best ways the team at Arrowhead has encouraged team synergy isthrough the various boosters available inHelldivers 2.
InHelldivers 2, boosters are unique buffs each player can bring into a match to enhance certain capabilities of their entire team. Like stratagems, they’re extremely powerful and give players the ability to modify and customize their experience with the game. But the developers at Arrowhead have to be careful with the creation and release of future boosters, lest they allow themselves to fall into a complete balancing nightmare.
Most Boosters are Just Too Niche to Be Universally Useful
Arrowhead has been very good so far atkeepingHelldivers 2a balanced experience. The studio knows that players enjoy feeling powerful and the team has done an excellent job ensuring that stratagems, weapons, and boosters remain impactful even as the difficulty ramps up. But unlike weapons and stratagems, boosters are in a precarious position that leaves some of the newer options feeling a little obsolete.
The first couple of boosters were fantastic, all-purpose buffs any team would be happy to have. Things like increased health, stamina, additional ammo reserves, and faster vaulting speed help out in every single match, regardless of how it ends up playing out. But theboosters inHelldivers 2’s most recent warbondshave become a little too niche to really compete with what came before.
Helldivers 2has boosters that do incredible thingslike increase reinforcement budget, decrease extraction time, and increase radar range, but simply pale in comparison to the utility of the original boosters. Perhaps the worst offender of this over-specialization is the booster Motivational Shocks, which allows Helldivers to recover faster after being slowed by an attack, such as acid. It does not, however, mitigate AOE attacks like EMS strikes. When compared to something as universally useful as a flat buff to a team’s health or stamina, it’s hard to consider taking such a seemingly situational booster.
There’s one deceptively simple solution to the issue: just make more generally useful boosters. It’s easy because it’s such an obvious answer to the problem, but determining what stats exactly to boost is another matter entirely. The trick is to buff certain stats that will be useful against all factions, like bullet damage and stratagem cooldown, and create other, separate boosters that buff stats that are more faction specific, like burn damage against the terminids.
Some Possible Boosters That Would be Universally Useful
This isn’t to say there’s no place for situational boosters. If a team knows for a fact they’ll be encountering some particular issues, giving them tools to counter them is a good thing; itrewardsHelldivers 2players for proper planning and coordination. There should simply be a more steady ratio of straightforward, all-purpose boosters to complex, highly situational boosters. Something close to a 3:1 ratio would keep the majority of boosters relevant to most of the player base while still allowing for highly situational specialists to have their time in the sun.
Ultimately, boosters remain a big part of what makes theHelldivers 2experience so unique, with teamwork shining through in even the most casual random lobbies. But without addressing the issue of theseextremely niche boosters that Arrowhead keeps delivering, the community is in danger of using the exact same four or five boosters that have been in the game since launch. By staggering the specialist options with more general all-purpose buffs, the devs can keep gameplay feeling fresh and varied for a much longer time.
Helldivers 2
WHERE TO PLAY
Do you believe in freedom? Can you stand in the face of oppression – and defend the defenceless? Wage war for peace. Die for democracy.Join forces with up to three friends and wreak havoc on an alien scourge threatening the safety of your home planet, Super Earth, in this multiplayer co-op shooter for PS5 and PC from Arrowhead Game Studios.Step into the boots of the Helldivers, an elite class of soldiers whose mission is to spread peace, liberty and Managed Democracy using the biggest, baddest and most explosive tools in the galaxy.Helldivers don’t go planet side without proper backup, but it’s up to you to decide how and when to call it in. Not only do you have a host of superpowered primary weapons and customizable loadouts, you also have the ability to call on stratagems during play.Helldivers 2 features Arrowhead’s best cooperative gameplay yet. Collaboration will be vital: Teams will synergize on loadouts, strategize their approach for each mission and complete objectives together.1Enlist in Super Earth’s premier military peacekeeping force today. We are heroes… we are legends… WE ARE HELLDIVERS.
