Helldivers 2 Special: Why is it so good? Second Galatic War Begins! New major Order!

what yeah how is that like look I'm sitting here PlayStation and TV's over there so I need to be in my gamer cha so you can see my good abilities because we're actually playing a game I'm good at I need to be in a gaming chair what the [ __ ] you talking I need to be in a gaming chair you want to see my chair [ __ ] chair from Kitchen Jesus Christ bro you're you're making all this sucess success stories than you're sitting in a kitchen chair doing your business [Music] Empire this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay 2 and 1 half steps ahead of the gaming industry spending money for a gaming chair I can't play because I don't have my gaming chair it's called ergonomics read a book I can't play because my skills are good only in the gaming chair all right let's start let just go Jesus Christ yeah hello hello hello welcome to our special episode uh this is going to be uh special because it's actually was pitched by Felix and we are going to talk about hell the game nobody cares about my name is m you care about it the all internet

yeah I I don't care about it okay so welcome my name isch I'm Felix braberg and this is our Flamingo who also doesn't care about hell divers but he care because you're bad at it I think no because I played it for like one hour or something and I don't I have zero motivation to play but you you were right that the Terminators are more fun than the those like we're playing bus man don't worry we're playing bucks the original one oh [ __ ] going to get killed and stuff and [ __ ] okay do you want to do you want to give a rundown on AR so this is not going to be only like uh fies and looking at mat's flying corpse all around the place which will definitely happen um definitely happen yeah but we're going to talk about the company actually because what they did was actually something very very important and I would say very good to kind of

take note of because comparing to aad are Swedish as well they're based in Stockholm I guess that's why I want to play the game oh can can you read Felix where the company was actually founded because I cannot read it hey one second you continue I will be right back just just go on go on okay so it was found founded there in 2008 in Sweden and actually the first game which the company like pretty much did put them onto on onto the gaming map was done in 2011 and it was magika and as you can see here it should be playing as I'm kind of talking Maga has this very very uh specific or let's say unique style of gaml if it actually loads the what's that fisherman M joining the fry or what what's happening see it's Ikea hat Ikea hat okay yeah so Maga

if it actually loads here I don't know why it's not loading need to reload the video so Maga is basically a game about these four Mages where you have these elements sucks and uh these four elements that you have there which is sorry eight elements that you have there it's pretty much you combine spells out of them and it's all Co-op and the main point or the main F can you fix your Internet please yeah I'm fixing it I guess uh yeah there we go so the main fan of the game as you can see here is that you are killing your friends together as you're killing the enemies that's that's that's the main point of it and now it killed my internet I don't know why will post produce that this oh no way no no no no no this is this is staying in this is staying in so everybody knows and seees like how prepared I don't know why why it's not not not kind of loading maybe maybe yeah there we go so

you see you have all these interactions like beams kind of clashing together and using it and stuff like that so pretty much the game was built on the premise of Friendly Fire and of these like silly spells silly interactions you doing like giant area of damage spells and stuff like that I think I can skip a little bit further can of get there or why YouTube is dying on me here nice this episode starts very good this is absolute anyway and by the way Felix you're you're talking from a Submarine by the way your mic is disconnected again it discon it disconnected again Jesus starts great anyway so this was 2011 that arroe headed Maga it put them on the map this was their first game it was I I would say very good success but still like an indie company then they did Showdown effect which is a side game a side scroller game I won't talk about that one in 2013 but in 2014 actually they did the game called gaun

oo I know this game yeah which is a you know this game yeah really starting to think that it's the screen sharing is actually kind of prohibiting my internet how how is that even possible I don't know or maybe because I'm running hell divers in the meantime in that's yeah maybe that's that's the case that seems to be the case which means I need to kill it for a second oh yeah I know this game yeah so Maga uh let see how it goes so Gauntlet now is again a four player cor game so again what Arrow had did they again use all their knowledge and pretty much Mastery they did from a Co-op multiplayer game and put another four person Co-op multiplayer game you see the pattern that's kind of forming here the game is about these kind of dungeon cloring Heroes I think it's about like a remaster one of like very very old games uh before the computer era if I understand correctly and then you have

your four Heroes as they can go through the Labyrinth and they have different abilities you have a lot of these again synergies and stuff like that it's pretty good I would say I was playing it back then and yeah I would say pretty okay then we go to actual hell divers game but this is Hell divers one done by 2015 which is one year after Gauntlet and again this game is a co-op game for four people uh it already has this kind of a lore which is heavily inspired by our favorite movie Starship Troopers um and then what you do you again go on other planets you have these missions it's pretty much hell diverse from upside as you know hell diverse 2 now this is basically the same lore same game same principle you have four people diving into these buck automatons and one more race that's not still in the second game you are completing your objectives in these missions it actually plays a exactly the same as hell diverse

it's just not from a third person but it has the exact same kind of a fun based on this kind of see Friendly Fire and you being jammed by the landing craft and stuff like like they pretty much had it all late there back then in 2015 it was all there so if you look at what's happening currently with hell divers 2 it's like it's the same thing just it's just the same thing on much bigger budget much better production values and much bigger Vision but it's exactly the same game just better bigger stronger and even back then it was run for president or something yeah something like that so he was uh it was already published by in 2015 so now after this game after nine years we're back to Hell divers 2 which uh went out 8 of February this year and literally took the Internet by storm uh because again it's a parody of our favorite parody movie

which is Starship Troopers but on the other hand now it's much more tangible and I would say they took the humor like one one notch over the top here with all the like cinematics the the story and everything and is just very very good fun that's coming from this kind of cob Friendly Fire the game is literally I wouldn't say it's not intended to play solo you can still play solo but it's very hard and after the last patch it's literally unplayable to go solo so you when when you even play the game you pretty much end up with other random people being matchmake so it's a c game to begin yeah it's true I played one Mission which I know I was alone and it was absolutely hard and I was like okay [ __ ] this like why am me even playing this and then I play with fre it was way more fun which difficulty it was easy easy yeah of easy I didn't even have like more than medium unlocked afterwards yeah so that's around the

game so the company has been actually making pretty much the same game for the last 14 years which is a cop Friendly Fire kind of action shooter RPG whatever and they literally mastered it and you can see the learnings really translated from all the way back to Maga like you can see some of the mechanics that they had there back in Maga like with this all like mambo jumbo press up arrow down arrow left Arrow whatever like they had the exact same combination in Maga like strats that's basically the input from Maga like I remember that thing where you had like oh this element that El that and then it would do blue screen of that spell whatever so um yeah we can continue and just pretty much get to Hell diverse 2 Felix you can take it from there until I start my ship yeah the submarine you actually booted me you booted me from the ship so than yeah so hell 2 AA said it's a shooter shooter Co-op

game where players p as a team against either the terminats a bug race that human the the humans have grown and farmed for resources for their Galactic Empire or the automatons a humanoid robot race that he like that Humanity has enslaved and we have them working in our mining mining Planet colonies and as you can hear from that little intro uh the human race which stems from Super Earth is far from the good guy and we're 100% the antagonist in this game and people are going wild for this game and it's partly due to how different it is from other console PC or console or PC games that have come out in the last three to five years uh so exactly like Remo said players from both PC and steam play together in a semi Overworld against bots uh and to complete general orders from Super Earth Commander General Brash uh general orders are played together with

other players on Steam and PlayStation and completing the orders results in medals which can be used as a currency to unlock weapons armor and poses general orders can be all sort of stuff things like kill two billion bugs in three days defend or attack planet Etc the point is that uh they're always play together and all players see things that change in the game so hell divers 2 is more of a double A instead of a tria a and is sold for a modest 39.99 hell divver 2 also monetizes by releasing these monthly war bonds which are packages that users uh can unlock with medals that cost around $10 uh and digging deeply on the forums people suggest that Sony were the ones that forced Arrowhead to actually put this monetization feature in the game

which I think yeah takes a really nice intro to Remo talking a bit about how the economy works because it's got few vectors like you're like talking about but maybe sum up what a vector actually is because people were asking on LinkedIn the other day yeah Vector means like a direction or design space meaning that it's some kind of a parameter that you design mechanics around so Vector can be literally like your HP your damage your movement speed or some kind of a design parameter that that you design other mechanics around the game that there's a game design back there um regarding the varones and the economy so you start this is pretty much this is how you start you start in your ship this is your main base of operation here we had M just throwing around and Felix should better move his ass over here also and sorry to interrup that but you Felix mentioned the PC and steam so consoles and PC right because Felix is on on PlayStation and we are on PC obviously yeah but this is this can be

only bought on Steam for now this is not on Epic store or any other or even not on Xbox of course so when you can join the ship uh there we go yeah we all on our ship so let's let's walk a little bit around like what's what's there in the game so the vbond economy and the whole economy revolves around these medals and super credits super credits is the hard currency of the game and medals is some kind of a let's say I would say soft currency could be uh the big difference is that game is pretty generous to begin with because if you look at this waron let's say the default one at each stage of the war bond you have literally you can trade your soft currency for hard currency like these medals for super credits and the vbon itself contain something like uh what's that 100 200 uh 300 uh where we go 300 400 uh 500 yeah so it contains 500 hard currency even to begin with with you

farm it all therefore you just need to find another 500 to actually go completely free even though of course the game is premium it cost $40 to just buy but what I'm saying that these like additional let's say battle passes that they like mini passes or season passes that you have here you can actually Farm it out in the game without paying anything like I can go into the shop and actually buy some stuff out of it uh into the Super as you see like the usual kind of discount prices of hard currency there's a little bit of like a cosmetic shop running here in the superstore with like three days refresh or something but these are all kind of optional like you can really get like a big weapon boost or whatever and if we are uh these are mainly I think Cosmetics only and the war bones they actually contain new weapons and stuff but as I said if you unlock the war bond for hard currency that you can actually Farm normally from missions like I don't think so for me be like hard to unlock let's say the newest

vbon that was just released today the Polaris Patriots one and yeah I unlock it and then just can for soft currency the medals I can just buy things from it anyway so they're very lenient I would say uh the monetization is not really that hard and I think this is also one of the success points of the game where people from PC Community are not against this monetization they don't consider it predatory or two tide or something because they can just go into the missions and farm the currency out themselves or speed it up through you know trading money for time that's there uh you upgrade or let's say you get your weapons here's your load out you have your primary your secondary or grenades then your Armory your helmet your cape your character some kind of additional stuff there some upgrades blah blah blah not really that important the very important mechanic is your ship modules which is actually here which means yeah this is just the name of your ship I guess there would be maybe of Justice yeah there we go it's all like I have claw I have claw I have claw of iron cannot set the name of your ship you

need to pick from the yeah yeah you know what I have a lord of gold Lord of gold yeah so they have this very nice naming editor where you have like 20 prefixes and 20 affixes that you choose from and there there's so many different combinations like I I try to like so much fun with it and I I spent like 30 minutes like oh my God like which is like the most bizarre one yeah yeah so uh then you have your Strat gems which are actually your like let's call them spells abilities that you can call during the fight and you slowly unlock them as you level up and get uh again another form of soft currency these credits uh to buy from and then you have ship modules which are basically hard passive upgrades of like reducing cooldowns increasing damage having more kind of stuff there you're typical skill three uh the the the most important thing regarding like the builds is you choose your Strat gems and then you

choose your kind of primary secondary weapons so let's go into like the map and like continue here to can talk a little bit about the galactic War uh this is other feature which kind of really differentiates the game that we have this Galactic map and it's very let's say interactive because the developers really are posing as some kind of game Masters you have these major orders that are literally taken by CEO himself if I understand correctly and he can of gives them to the whole community and then the whole Community goes after them so let's say currently we are on a major order that we need to liberate these four planets already did two out of four it takes 18 more hours to get there and you can see the real STS of it so let's say we have the we planed here and you can see how the percentage kind of goes up as players are slowly liting like even after like finishing 99 there 999,000 players playing there right now like yeah which I guess the number seems to be Trust 30 but you never know you never know yeah

you never know but the nice thing is that you feel like you are part of the community like you see the community doing these things even after the mission you literally see how much percentage your impact of the mission did on the actual timer which can be like literally 1,000 of a percent like sometimes it's pretty big so you see that we have now this order for the world planet and there I think there's a one here on aamar which yeah I guess people need to move their ass in order to do within 18 hours but yeah let's see I guess hopefully anyway uh then you get this reward from the major order which is again for the whole Community more soft currency then you have daily Quest that your personal order which is some kind of a usual kind of a kill 20 bucks with flamethrower whatever something that you that you get there and uh of course there's these kind of a fields which are covering the Galaxy as the war progresses and it's ongoing Dynamic process which is really good because having ongoing like Dynamic endgame

systems like this is something similar to like P of Exile where we have also the atlas of maps this is kind of similar to it a little bit where different points are getting liberated or whatever I know there's for instance this uh controversy recently about this this planet uh Merida because it was before blue and now it's green and all the supply rools are kind of missing and this is the important part that the developers leave these kind of low hints into the game and these controversies and like suddenly people find some kind of new things in the game they don't know what it is about go viral on YouTube it goes viral on YouTube it goes viral on Twitter on internet people start to speculate and then they unhide the mystery through like new mechanic new Enemy new race new something so it's pretty cool very very cool yeah it's very cool and it's reminds me of the old days where you would have like game Masters in all MMO RPGs like Ultima Online or back then where it's literally the content is created by the employees

of the company not some kind of script or template of an event is literally somebody sitting behind the computer and writing the story as they go so this is this is I would say outstanding and that's why I think it's one of the reasons why this game is making so much noise into on the internet yeah so let let me just mention a bit a couple numbers here so the game was released on the 24th of February 2024 and to and as of end of April it had 482 million gross revenue so half a billion dollars in three months which is quite impressive for a double a studio not bad yeah not bad yeah um and I guess that I guess that leads us also really carefully in right because this game has been such a big hit and just last week there was also another bit of quite big controversy around hell divers because hell divers made by Arrowhead and is

then published by Sony Entertainment right so Sony pretty much saw the growth of Hell divers and saw that it had a really big footprint on PC and steam and they were like ah nice so two weeks ago or 10 days ago uh they announced that everyone who's playing hell divers will be forced to do a PlayStation login or to use a PlayStation login and create one to still be able to play on PC even if you don't own playst yeah even if you don't own a PlayStation here so there's four big problems to this first of all it's annoying PC players don't have PlayStation or PCN accounts so yeah it's just irritating to have to link your Steam account uh from one and it wasn't even like communicated from day one second it's a bit Shady because players uh they might not purchase the game uh or they might like return if they know they couldn't like play it later on

because third issue is that PSN is not live in all the countries in the world so when they announced this they took hell divers away from 170 countries so there are people that have bought played and levered their characters and then they can't get a refund because it's after the 30-day return policy so people were Furious and they took to the Discord channels where one of the community Managers from Arrowhead actually encouraged players leave bad reviews and W did they leave bad reviews yeah you could see can take it from there yeah you can see the chart on screen it's pretty much this is how it happened because this is May 3rd where the news was kind of pretty much announced you could see 37k negative reviews the next day it was 71k negative reviews the other day it was 94k negative reviews and altogether it was like 221,000 negative reviews of the game literally hell dive to the most hated

game on Steam like I think it was top three or top four like instantly so the community had a very very strong opinion about this yeah re reviews mixed yeah reviews meant like like mostly negative I think immediately like they just like was mostly negative immediately oiv and the worst part was that Sony uh when they were asked to comment on it they said that they required the PSN login for security reasons yeah yeah which is a problem Sony was hacked numerous times in last years and people are complaining about it a lot because their accounts were hacked like a lot of times so yeah that's there and then uh to everybody's not surprised Captain Obvious Sony of course backed off and uh pretty much backtracked from their um announcement and said that nobody now on PC requires to kind of create a PSN account and the community PR Prett much started the operation cleanup which is that people

started changing their reviews so we are currently sitting at 96,000 positive reviews but you could see the ratio still didn't return yeah it's it's not quite there yet yeah because there's also like basic human psychologies negative emotions are much more energizing than positive one that that's how it feels so everybody likes to complain but yeah like yeah I think you have the the PhD from psychology right yeah yeah but just saying like it it take took the Internet by storm again again creating a lot of bus for the game uh and I guess people are like really proud now with like memes were flying all over the place how Hell divers pretty much took down the corporation like major order completed yeah but also remember this game has had like at his Peak uh I think it has something like 700,000 concurrent players at one Peak and it's decreased a lot now right but at one point it was

seriously crazy how many people were playing this at once uh currently as the as as we record the peak was 253k and as we are recording it's on Sixth most concurrent game on Steam currently with 125k concurrent users so this is the graph for now but if you go the whole graph you could see that yeah of course they started from like these kind of a giant step but yeah it's still like top six pretty good so I I wouldn't say it's like a bad thing um yeah you could see a question of when they decide that to introduce the new race or have super Earth Earth being invaded and it'll get back to those crazy levels again yeah I think that they will get back to Crazy levels once they start kind of pumping up again the like the noise and Buzz around like these kind of new developments but currently I would say yeah there's the new one B but regarding the story has been a little bit stale for now for last two weeks or so we see yeah anyway uh let's get to the game actually

to show you how it works the game has actually like nine difficulties as you see here so the biggest one being hell dive the lowest one being uh to trial we can we can just for M maybe we can do whatever heart say hard for which one is the one that spawns B Titans or we need extreme uh you need you need extreme for that okay so let's try that one [ __ ] idiot we can show that on I think we should take uh yeah best case scenario we can take like daytime daytime because you can literally like select if you want to do mission in daytime or nighttime based on the planet cycle that's really nice as you go I did nighttime mostly I I didn't realize that until playing it for it's very good especially for long range weapons some plans are literally like all in Mist you don't want to pretty much like just doesn't even know where already shooting we probably won't finish a mission we

won't have time but let's just play a little bit Yeah Yeah fine we can go let's say this one and let's see yeah what yeah whatever let's go so after you need to go to the hell Poots you see how nicely the game pretty much like it moves literally your ship moves on the planet to the location yeah if we would select another planet he would literally jump to another planet and you see how many people are here like all the players as are as we are pretty much like going around it because this is the plan that everybody's currently liberating so we go into the hellot and then we actually choose the location where to land with the hots other people can suggest but only the host can determine it so thank God no no not into water uh where do we go uh let's go here for instance yeah somewhere here uh then you select your strategen and load out for

the game based on the mission like this is pretty much the tactics part like because of this kind of a mission you select this or that or whatever let me just put uh this one this one this one this one and this one yeah okay and there we go and you pretty much go hell diving woohoo The Cinematic part of this game is really good the atmos and this whole kind of a story and everything they literally nail it down perfectly the music music music is perfect EP it's literally like playing like being in the movie Starship Troopers you feel like it yeah but I need to pull I need to turn on turn up the volume a little bit more because I want to hear those terrible bucks creeping on my back yeah so what happens after you land you immediately try to summon your gear here because it needs to land also from

the hellot there you have your little mini game with like doing the combinations either on keing board on Playstation this is play ponent song from Zelda yeah yeah it's literally the same thing as they had in mag the same same mechanic so let's get my gear here okay and there we go usually we want to stick together we can put a SOS Beacon to summon one more play into our game that's a nice mechanic they have here which pretty much just prioritizes your game on the map that everybody else will be kind of trying to join here but I don't know if somebody joins on hard difficulty because everybody is this is not hard this is Extreme now oh yeah it's extreme still bit too easy H still too easy yeah to too easy let's close these bu holes yeah so destroy X this is our mission now we just you have different objectives and stuff you can find loot on the map with these like can Rand side events and [ __ ] what's there yeah there we go

there's lot of bugs there let me put like Eagle bomb there yeah do it and uh yeah this is how you do it the thing is that you need to be careful about not killing your teammates because lot of times it can happen very easily especially landing on them there we go yeah that's pretty much it yeah that's pretty much it I would say uh should we uh the good part is that a lot of mechanics actually even in the game play are also done kind of multi [ __ ] multiplayer wise multi [ __ ] yeah so for instance there's this rocket launcher that literally one guy can pick up the pack and just reload as the other guy shoots which is literally designed to be done in pairs like just the whole kind of a weapon oh yeah there we go Felix goes

down by pe pew pew thank you very much yeah you killed me that's me yeah okay that happens all the time it's part of the fun yeah it's part of the fun as I said Friendly Fire is like the bread and butter of this game yeah yeah first time I died really yeah really yeah but anyway like uh it's quite fun to see that a game like this is getting so much fraction for being very different from compared to other games and there were cries that that should turn off their friendly fire no no way a fun game it would lose like half of it pretty much exactly yeah yeah sorry sorry I can't why don't we uh why don't we uh finish the podcast here and have anyone reach out to us who wants to play hell divers with us because it's a lot of fun and then we can just play this right now and upload the video later yeah yeah definitely I guess we can stop it here but if you want to continue watching I guess m will add it into the blue real we can just turn it off play yeah that

there anyway all good we will see you all on a normal episode soon again yeah thanks for watching thank you very much oh Jesus [ __ ] Christ this is terrible [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] yob just you know did you just remove your mic or you can do few things yeah oh [ __ ] is the usual press mute button okay I was talking it was quite

nice actually yeah from when I was like I didn't a long time yeah for a long time yeah I didn't hear you any yeah I didn't hear anything from you I was like this way guys follow me yeah okay yeah yeah okay I didn't see any difference with me talking on not yeah that's true yeah I mean it was quite calm yeah I going to say oh my help me yeah where are you where are you I got a charger behind me stick together that's that's the thing yeah charger I'm going to take it down just take it to the hole you have quar you have my other quar yeah where are you here all right so uh dear listeners this is how you this is how you talk when he's muted you can talk finally yeah yeah

exactly oh jees out of ammo I called on a supply I got him Jesus I got where's the B Titan I want to see the B Titan [Music] going to see B because what big it's [ __ ] giant I know yeah I saw I saw all those videos already I'm call so fun so fun taking the down those giant things really why tried to compensate something there's a guy with the Range [Laughter] Rover yeah you're going the wrong direction again

yeah tell tell that to my accounting Mis let's go the other way