HELLDIVERS 2 is an amazing live service WHEN it WANTS to be

You have no idea the rollercoaster this script went through

There is no better feeling than getting 100 super credits from a random drone. God bless.

This feels pretty well timed after Microsoft just shut down Tango Gameworks, and then said “we need smaller games that gives us prestige and award.”

Bricky trying to make a normal video for once: Universe: "Let me explain to you why that's not gonna fly"

It’s also baffling with what’s going on with AAA studios recently because who’s gonna want to work with you if you close studios or interfere with how the game is run? I’m an artist, and if all my employer is gonna do is lie to me and fuck up MY project, then I’d rather self publish than sell my soul to a corp.

The fact you forgot to put Team Fortress 2's Heavy on the right in the thumbnail baffles me.

Having Brad of all people read the corporate announcement in the intro is very funny considering how much time he spends justly complaining about GW's horrible practices.

This coming out right after Helldivers 2 became unavailable for countries you can't make a PSN account in is the universe fucking with Bricky.

Steam reviews be like: "Nah, I'd dive."

A thing not brought up is that the armors in the cash shop dont come with exclusive effects, but instead are effects already available (and they rotate consistently, eliminating full FOMO)

Bad timing?

What's funny is if they would've just given a free cape and/or armor without making it mandatory, they would've had a ton of new Sony accounts.

Sony has not made helldivers 2 playabale still in all of those countries. They added more countries to the ban list.

The use of the survivors bias to explain the circumstances of Balatro and Lethal Company was great. couldn't really find a better way to explain "Indie is great, but there's a reason why in 9000 releases a year, you might only know about 3-9 of em"

I wish “Bricked Up” would make more video essay-like videos. This shit slaps

Your point about suspicious really hits home. The community is currently getting quite upset about how Arrowhead is managing balance patches, and bugs. The recent Sony debacle burned a TON of community good will, and Arrowhead is going to have to work hard to get it back. And yes, parts of this video did age like milk. Arrowhead finally fixed the bug with the Eruptor that made it fling you towards the explosion, which accidentally turned into a MASSIVE nerf, since it neutered the Eruptor's ability to kill swarms of enemies, since follow-up shots now hit almost nothing, rather than a cluster of enemies flung towards your original shot. Then, at the same time, Arrowhead delivered a MAJOR nerf to the Eruptor, not once, but twice in the span of a few days. Not only did ammo capacity get halved, but now you need almost twice as many shots to kill groups of enemies, and it's substantially worse at it's main goal of killing heavier enemies. The gun is dead. The Sony debacle really did hurt the community. Right now, I'm taking a break from Helldivers, since I'm not a huge fan of the constant nerfs to previous warbond weapons right as they release new warbonds. The new warbond is pretty terrible, with a gun worse than the entry level assault rifle, and only one good SMG that everyone is expecting to get nerfed HARD very soon. I don't know why I'd bother with the warbond when the weapons constantly bounce between "unusable" and "waiting for it to get nerfed to unusable". I'm tired of never having a reliable weapon to kill things, especially with all the stealth buffs to enemies and patrols constantly making the game harder as Arrowhead only nerfs the best weapons. Usually, the new warbond contains some pretty useless weapons, like the still-useless laser pistol, and fire grenades that were bugged for months. Why bother with Warbonds if half the weapons don't work? Until Arrowhead can clean up their balance patching, and get their technical problems fixed so they don't release new ship upgrades that literally never worked at launch, I'm going to take a step back from Helldivers and play other games. It's unfortunate, because I really wanted to be playing Helldivers for a long long time, but given how I went from running the game fine to having more than one game breaking progression blocking bugs per mission, I'm just not having fun anymore.

Josh Strife Hayes made a video on something called "Horizontal Vs. Vertical Progression." What makes Helldivers 2 Live service so good, is that it follows the Horizontal Progression model. Horizontal Progression is the concept of having gear, abilities, or weapons be good in some areas, but bad in others and relative to build diversity. 50% chance to negate lethal damage is a decent buff, but is it better than 50% less explosive damage? That depends on what your fighting. Having better sprint isn't necessarily better then having more Stims, or grenades.

I JUST WANNA KNOW WHY HE SPRAYED PELICAN-1's BAY WITH THE FLAMER

I get Bricked up everytime I Helldive

Part of the continued dissatisfaction towards Helldivers 2 is that during the initial PSN debacle, Sony decided their first solution was to restrict where you can buy the game. In at least 177 countries: you can't make a PSN account (and using a VPN is against Sony's TOS) and now you can't buy Helldivers 2. And when they said they wont go forward with the PSN update we celebrated because we thought won. But we haven't won. They pulled the wool over our eyes because people in those 177 countries STILL CANT BUY THE GAME. And in fact, THE AMOUNT OF RESTRICTED COUNTRIES HAS ONLY GROWN. AND ON TOP OF THAT, those SAME countries are also restricted in purchasing another Sony game on steam, "Ghost of Tsushima". How soon will it be that another game becomes restricted? This may only be the beginning. But nobody cares about any of that anymore because the heat died down and people jumped off the hate train. If people really cared about fighting against what Sony was trying to do, they'd still care about it now. We liberated a planet, but the sector is still under attack. We need those other Helldivers at our side, and we need them now more than ever.