Helldivers

Note: Written for Reddit so may sound weird in terms of formatting

Greetings friends, I achieved 100k kills today and gained the Platinum trophy (now in the hallowed echelons of 0.1%). I’ve been playing since the day the game came out, but instead of just mindlessly grinding out the last 55k or so kills I needed I stopped playing, anticipating an eventual PS+ release. I wasn’t aware that the PC platform was cross play so that never came to mind, and thus the waiting continued. And continued… Until one begins to question one’s sanity… Aha! At last almost a year later Sony finally caved and gave us a good PS+ game again. And so the game was fun for a time in multiplayer as more of the near release general insanity and less of the methodical efficiency reigned. Of course in remarkably short order that faded again and I was sort of wallowing in some odd boredom state, but then I realized this simple thing: Solo is fun when you’re fucking incredible at the game. Any solo or co-op game with an extremely high skill ceiling enables a sort of out of body experience where your hands and brain continue doing the motions but you consciously are simply observing yourself doing these nigh impossible feats. I’ve had this feeling before in a few different games, most recently Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, in which I was so much better at the Wolfpack mode than everyone else that I single handedly got the experience and credit gain nerfed (and shortly stopped playing thereafter, sadly the competitive multiplayer aspect was mostly ruined in Black Flag after being easily the best multiplayer experience for the entire generation for 3 games running).

But enough about that, let’s talk about me. As you may have surmised that is indeed my favorite topic. According to PSN Profiles I was the 14^th Grand Lord ever to exist (used to be 2^nd, I guess they demoted me in my 7-8 month AWOL period, but hey 14^th sounds better), so yes in contrast to what some of you may believe I’ve been around since the dawn of Helldivers time. I was the top Illuminate player for much of the first major war and at that time being at the top of the leaderboards meant more than just sitting around sniping Enemy Master kills all day every day, you actually had to go out there and do some legwork yourself. I wrote up several tier lists around launch and they hold up reasonably well, of course not including then non-existent DLC. Back then everyone thought Justice was the greatest, of course they weren’t too bright.

For all you new guys and PC players the Illuminates used to be really fucking hard, like way harder than every other race by a factor of three or four; most enemies had almost twice as much life and the MC guys had much better tracking, did more damage, and the control switching lasted for much longer. So being the top Illuminate player was no small feat. Of course now I can just roll around with Double Freedom (which incidentally was also the best weapon against Illuminates back then, but not a single handed murder machine precluding all other stratagems like it is now) and just obliterate everything.

However somehow not playing the game for months and months made me much better against bugs while solo, that and I bought the Toxic Avenger which is just totally insane against bugs, but also a fun and dynamic weapon that’s interesting to use. Hence Bugs became almost as fun as the Illuminates, and now we have a double threat of satisfaction. As to the Cyborgs… well anyone who enjoys fighting them is obviously a communist (note I may or may not be a Marxist in real life) post the introduction of dogs.

I am not going to stop playing Helldivers entirely as I initially thought I would, the reason being there’s no other game to get that sweet euphoria of playing extremely well with no actual mental effort on my end; and games with super high skill ceilings are extremely rare. However with the release of Salt and Sanctuary tonight I’ll be focusing on that for a while, then Dark Souls 3 comes out and obviously same thing there, I spend about 5-6 hours a day screening, editing, and uploading Street Fighter V videos, and I start work (thankfully online) in April which’ll eat at least another 4 hours out of my day for 5-6 days a week. So I just don’t have much time, but I’ll try to stick around; I may for instance participate in the coming Illuminate Homeworld siege.

To the developers: Thanks for making such an incredible game with such a high skill ceiling. Make more DLC like the Avenger and less DLC like the Sickle. Hell if you had lead with the avenger I might have just bought every piece of DLC you put out (note: I may or may not have made like 5 times my investment back on Helldivers). Always backload the OP shit man, simple business strats. This is what happened to the guy who designed dogs before he designed them. Before you start work on the next game I’d recommend some personality readjustment training and/or more lobotomies. Lots more lobotomies.

This is still my favorite mission.

Signed:
Valgresas, 14^th Grand Lord, Epitome of Super Earth