'It's surprisingly close to what we had': Helldivers 2 creative director talks about making supply lines clearer after fans take matters into their own hands
Managed Democracy simplified.
There's been a lot of confusion in Helldivers 2 recently. With some players misunderstanding a recent Major Order and a bit of distracted managed democracy, some are calling for a change to how supply lines are laid out.
Divers were making a brave effort to liberate the Western Front, fighting with everything they had against the Automatons, but unfortunately, everything fell apart after a mid-order change. Joel (the Game Master) decided to make players choose between defending the planet Draupnir and liberating Ubanea. The sudden change and rapid confusion that spread across the ranks meant that many ended up choosing to fight for Ubanea too late and, therefore, lost access to the planet, a crucial stepping stone to the final goal of the Major Order, Tibit.
The supply lines that would have aided Divers in the completion of the Major Order to restore Tibit were pretty unclear, so much so that one soldier, Thekrzysiek, decided to create a mockup of what a clearer supply line map could look like. This was spotted and shared on Twitter by Helldivers Alerts.
A Simple concept of what supply lines could look like in game????Thekrzysiek pic.twitter.com/Jfr1JW7Eh0March 31, 2024
Plenty of players flooded the comments talking about how this is a perfect change and how having "supply lines in the ship's UI would be amazing!" and they weren't alone. Johan Pilestedt, the CEO and creative director of Arrowhead, even replied to this short clip, saying that this concept is "surprisingly close to what we had in the game before. But we wanted to visualize all of the supply lines, and it got way too cluttered. We are talking about making this more clear internally at the studio."
After the recent debacle with Tibit, it's clear that something needs to change, especially if Divers are expected to react with lightning speed to changes on surrounding battlefields, which can have critical consequences on the outcome of Major Orders. But luckily, it looks like Arrowhead is already on the case. So, who knows, between mysterious cloaked gunships and buffs to heavy armour, we could soon see an update to the in-ship UI.