The hit game Helldivers 2 has hit another problem, and it is one that every developer wants to have. The game had been teasing the idea that players would be able to summon and use mechs as part of the game. As expected, the players loved the idea and set themselves to unlocking giants with unintended consequences.
What are the mechs, and what did players do to unlock them?
So, Helldivers 2 did not originally start with mechs, but they do seem to have been planned from the start. The game has several features that will be rolled out as time goes on; the mech has just been the first one announced. Now, as you might expect, when an audience is told about a new and shiny object, the first thing they want to do is get ahold of it.
Unlocking the mech was a story-based idea within the game. Players would have to go and liberate a planet where they were manufactured. This has a significant impact throughout the whole game, an effect that is amplified when players realize there is a game master who assigns these things.
The devs had planned for this campaign in the game to take a significant amount of time, but gamers far exceeded that. According to Johan Pilestedt, the company’s president, players got ahold of mech four times faster than he thought they would. This had a big impact on the game, and it wasn’t just a bunch of metal-suited players walking around.
What happened when they did unlock them?
As soon as players unlocked the ability to call in mechs, they did so, and they did it a lot. It became such an issue because so many mechs were being ordered that it was overloading servers. Now, this has proved to be a problem as it affects the whole game, and the devs did notice it.
They have said that they are working on a solution so that players will be able to have mechs and play the game. That solution will not be available for a while, so they ask fans to be patient. This is admittedly a good problem for a gaming company to have, and they will have to fix it quickly.
The solution will more than likely come in one of two forms. The first would be a patch of some kind that would limit the mechs, whether that is how many can be ordered or how big their file size is. The second would be to acquire more servers for the game so that they could not be overloaded so easily.
It seems reasonable that the latter will be chosen as players will want to have their mechs and play the game, too. This is not the first time the devs have dealt with this, though, as the game was an unexpected hit with a larger player base than servers to accommodate them. This has just been resolved so that it can pop up, but it is being worked on.
