GamesThird Person ShooterHelldivers 2Helldivers 2 announces a massive new update: The Escalation of Freedom, bringing over 3 new enemy types, fresh objectives, a new difficulty, and votekick protectionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesThird Person ShooterHelldivers 2Helldivers 2 announces a massive new update: The Escalation of Freedom, bringing over 3 new enemy types, fresh objectives, a new difficulty, and votekick protectionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Arrowhead Games)
Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Games announced earlier this year that it’d beslowing down its update cadenceto deliver bigger, beefier patches—and they certainly meant it.
Announced earlier today, The Escalation of Freedom is a major free update arriving next month that’ll be bringing new enemies, mission objectives, a fresh biome, an even harder difficulty, and a clever take on votekick protection.
Helldivers 2 - Escalation of Freedom Announcement Trailer | PS5 & PC Games - YouTubeWatch On
Helldivers 2 - Escalation of Freedom Announcement Trailer | PS5 & PC Games - YouTube
Helldivers 2 - Escalation of Freedom Announcement Trailer | PS5 & PC Games - YouTube
The Automatons’ll get new toys, too. We only get to see one of them, but they have other “surprises” in store according to the game’sofficial blog—I’m not sure what can get worse than a giant tank with an artillery battery strapped to the top of it, but I’m keen to find out.
As if the existence of these new terrors wasn’t enough to fill your standard-issue helmet with tears, there’s also going to be a new difficulty level: Super Helldive, where these horrors will presumably take centre-stage.
The video above promises that this isn’t the full gauntlet of features in the update, though one thing mentioned in the blog caught my eye—a change “to mitigate the problem of grief kicking in Helldivers 2.”
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Simply put, you’ll still be able to kick players willy-nilly—however, if you do so, they’ll spawn into their own session with a duplicate of all their team’s previous loot. How exactly this’ll be handled—whether you’ll be put at an equivalent spot in your mission, or if you’ll just have to do another mission with extra goodies to find—is unclear.
Still, it feels like a pretty novel way to handle grief kick protection, which can often be a Catch 22 for developers. Make it too hard to boot someone, and you give griefers a big window to cause havoc—make it too easy, and you give those same griefers the ability to waste 40 minutes of their unfortunate victims' time.
The Escalation of Freedom plans to release August 6, and I’m curious to see what else Arrowhead Games has tucked away in its quiver. It’ll be interesting, too, to see how the studio continues to flesh out itsGalactic War—a unique mechanic that’s had high highs and low lows for the live service success story.
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