Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Games announced earlier this year that it'd be slowing down its update cadence to 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.
First up, the big bads: The Terminids have been given the Impaler, a truly accursed batch of giant tentacles that'll erupt from the ground to cut you off—though you can still knock 'em down if you'd like. There's also the Spore Charger, a massive version of the bug's fearsome tanks that're accompanied by their own smoke cloud, alongside bigger and badder Brood Commanders.
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's official 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.
When it comes to the missions themselves, there's a new spooky swamp biome, larger outposts to siege, and additional objectives such as one where you steal a crying baby. I mean democratise a soulless Terminid larva that's crying, drawing bugs to your position. There's also an acid storm, which'll reduce both your and your enemy's armour.
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."
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 its Galactic War—a unique mechanic that's had high highs and low lows for the live service success story.
