Summary
- Upgrading the Super Destroyer in Helldivers 2 improves stratagems' cooldown times and damage effects over time with collected samples in missions.
- Arrowhead must carefully balance future Super Destroyer upgrades to avoid overpowering the game's stratagems and affecting gameplay difficulty.
- To maintain game balance, developers should consider creative upgrades for stratagems besides damage and cooldown buffs in Helldivers 2.
One of the coolest aspects of Helldivers 2 is getting to upgrade the Super Destroyer over time. By collecting samples in-mission, players can upgrade their ships and subsequently improve their Helldiver's stratagems in various ways, including improved cooldown times, top increased damage, larger explosions, and more. While collecting samples is easy enough, the costs for some of the later upgrades are pretty steep for all but the most hardcore players, making them excellent incentives to keep most players engaged with the game in the long term.
Recent updates have proven that the developers are going to keep adding more and more upgrades for players to keep grinding for. But there’s a very fine line Arrowhead has to walk when it considers future Super Destroyer upgrades. While it's undeniably cool to see the destroyer's firepower increase over the course of the game’s lifespan, the developers have to consider the power these upgrades have over Helldivers 2’s difficulty curve.
Continued Super Destroyer Upgrades Could Make Stratagems Overpowered
The Super Destroyer upgrades in Helldivers 2 are some of the most powerful upgrades available to the player. They increase the effectiveness of stratagems, which are the lifeblood of the game and the main attraction that has set the title apart from its competitors. These stratagems are insanely powerful at a base level, as to even the odds between the four Helldivers and the endless hordes of bots and bugs. But that’s exactly where the problem comes from: stratagems are already strong without the upgrades.
Game balance is a critical consideration for any developer running a live service game, be it PVP or PVE. If one weapon or tool becomes too powerful in the meta, it ruins build diversity and generally makes the game less challenging and fun overall. Everyone wants to feel like a powerful, formidable force on the battlefield, but doing so with a broken or overpowered weapon dilutes the sense of accomplishment whenever they pull off something cool in-game. Helldivers 2 has seen its fair share of balance issues and fans haven't always been pleased with the outcome/
How Arrowhead Can Address Stratagem Power Creep With Continued Super Destroyer Upgrades
Continued Super Destroyer upgrades over the course of Helldivers 2’s lifespan will inevitably make certain stratagems a little overtuned. Chief among these are going to be the various orbital strikes and the Eagle One bombing runs, which are easily the most powerful attacks in the game at a baseline. If Arrowhead isn’t careful with its Super Destroyer upgrades, these stratagems can end up making the gameplay feel trivial, with increased cooldowns and more damaging explosions taking out enemies faster than originally intended.
It’s going to be a difficult balancing act for Arrowhead. There’s no two ways about it. One less-than-desirable fix for stratagem power creep is to abandon future plans for more Super Destroyer upgrades. This would ensure that stratagems can always be balanced since the power scale isn’t constantly updated with new content. But it would be disappointing to veteran players who’ve invested so much time into their upgrades; they’d have nothing left to spend their hard-won samples on and would eventually start losing interest in the game without more long-term goals to work towards.
The Ideal Approach For Balancing Stratagems Moving Forward
Another, perhaps more measured, approach to this issue would be finding creative new upgrades for stratagems that aren’t straight damage/cooldown buffs. Maybe a future Super Destroyer upgrade increases the amount of smoke from smoke grenades and orbital stratagems. Perhaps a future upgrade changes how stratagems function altogether, giving players more options based on what kind of mission they're heading into.
The bridge upgrade that buffs all fire damage should be the gold standard for designing Destroyer upgrades moving forward. It encourages the use of a specific build (in this case, fire-based weaponry) while not rendering any of the affected stratagems overpowered. Fire stratagems are already great at dealing out damage and the Destroyer upgrade accentuates that strength while not trying to compensate for flamethrowers’ short range and tendency to cause friendly fire damage.
Helldivers 2
- Released
- February 8, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
- Arrowhead Game Studios, Nixxes
- Publisher(s)
- Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Publishing
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op
- Franchise
- Helldivers
- Number of Players
- 1-4 players (online)
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- Genre(s)
- Third-Person Shooter, Extraction Shooter, Action, Science Fiction
- Metascore
- 83
- Platforms That Support Crossplay
- PC & PS5
