A new Helldivers 2 balancing update is coming very soon

Helldivers 2 has turned out to be a way, way more complicated game to manage than anyone anticipated to be. This includes its developer, Arrowhead Games, with the team struggling to stay on top of Helldivers 2‘s problematic meta. A new update, though, is coming, and it’s coming soon.

Notably, the current Arrowhead Games CEO, Shams Jorjani, has responded to one player’s concerns about the state of the Thermite Grenade, telling them to “see how [they] feel in 2 weeks.” This suggests that some manner of balancing will be dropping in within the next 14 days, which puts this potential update well ahead of Arrowhead’s prior 60-day rebalancing plan. There’s potential for this to be a majorly positive showing, if that’s what’s really up.

Arrowhead CEO suggests a balancing update is coming our way within the next two weeks

Now, the really intriguing bit comes from a little while ago, when the former CEO, Johan Pilestedt, held an impromptu Q&A session on that very same Discord. There, he promised a comprehensive rebalance of the Helldivers 2 meta in the coming weeks. Pilestedt’s responses were obviously more far-reaching than anything that could quickly be plopped down into a balancing update. Yet, it’s entirely reasonable to expect that the update Jorjani’s hinting at would include some of the goodies Pilestedt himself talked about.

At the very tail end of April, Pilested also discussed how a future update would make for a big “experience shift” for Helldivers 2. The update’s goal? To make the game feel more like it did back on day one, at the very height of its glory and popularity. “I have had a good time with the experience shift, and it is closer to the original intent of the game and what it was at launch,” he said at the time.

All of this combines to make for a very promising update. At the same time, I’d recommend keeping a pinch of salt at hand, just in case. The Escalation of Freedom update looked like an absolute slam dunk at the time, only for it to end up tanking Helldivers 2‘s meta in a particularly painful way. As I said at the start, balancing Helldivers 2 is no mean feat.

Now, I recently took a look back at Helldivers 2 in the context of Magicka. Magicka was, for a long while, Arrowhead Game’s most popular and beloved offering, but it ended up falling face-first into the mud. It’s currently altogether brokend and an absolute crash bonanza if you’re not using a community patch, and if we’re being honest, many of the game’s problems came about due to Arrowhead’s inexperience in gamedev at the time. Thing is, Arrowhead is seemingly repeating many of those problems with Helldivers 2, too, and I can’t help but wonder why that is the case. A staccato of solid, community-applauded updates could still turn things around, thankfully, and I’ve got my fingers crossed this is the start of it.