Lemmy was overall a very small part of it. It is a very small community compared to other social platforms. Even if every single Lemmy user owned Helldivers 2 AND left a review, it would still account for less than a quarter of the recent Steam reviews.
I mean, this game has a meta war that determines all available planets, mission types and rolls out content based on community involvement. It would be nice to have an offline mode, too, but this game is not completely decoupled from being online, unlike Hitman or something.
Its just an arbitrary mechanic added to justify an always online requirement. Helldivers had an offline option. There's still a game there without the need for "community involvement", the missions etc could be completely random or seeded for people who dont want to connect to a server.
Its always sad to see potential great games ruined by greed.
Did the first one really have offline? I played the shit out of it, but I was always connected. Sure, they should implement something similar here, too, but it is genuine work they need to put in to get it there, I'm sure they had to invest that for the first game especially since it was on the Vita.
It isn't arbitrary, though, go on any of the communities that care about the meta war and you'll see people really do keep up with it and enjoy it, they work with each other to focus on the major orders and do a bit of roleplaying at the same time.
I know that you're very anti always online, and I understand and agree that it should be optional, but to say that nothing comes out of it would also be disingenuous.
You are right, it does provide something. I just personally don't value it over a more typical online co-op setup. I just wish options weren't scary and implemented more.
Me too. I know it's a bit of work to set up an alternate mode and method to get to different planets and missions, and I'm sure teams are run really tightly on what gets worked on or not due to paying for whole teams to work, but I do wish they did what they could to future proof it.
A lot of always online games are awesome, have artistic merit, and can be looked back upon later as gaming history, and if they don't preserve these "art pieces" then a huge chunk of gaming history will likely disappear into the ether in 10 or 20 years. It seems a little silly to me that we can go back and play Mario 64, or even Helldivers 1 and see what that was like, but Helldivers 2 will become an inaccessible splash screen, it's a waste of all of the time and work, and even the money that went into making this happen in the first place.
