Well done fellow Helldivers. Managed Democracy has triumphed over her enemies once again. Eat it, Sony.

09/29/2024 edit: Honestly the game is fine now. The only critical thing is fixing performance issues that came with the weapon crafting/mastery update. I get horrid framerate drops around Hadron's area on the Mourningstar and the Weapon Mastery menu usually drops me to 20-30 (less than 10 frames if near Hadron and accessing Weapon Mastery menu). Rain also has a nasty habit of dropping me below 30FPS and I get stuttering during hordes if there's a lot of gas/flames.

More maps would also be nice. There's maybe 15 maps currently, but about a third of them are partial (or almost full) repeats of a different map but going through it the opposite direction. Some maps also suffer from having too little cover, making a melee focused character/build extremely painful to play and trivializing ranged focused characters/builds ability to deal with enemy shooters. Archivum Sycorax map should be the golden standard going forward. 10/10 map/cover design as well as aesthetic.

• For the love of the Emperor, when a sniper spawns give him an audio cue or a slightly longer charge-up. I swear the team I run with has collectively taken more damage from snipers specifically than any other damage source because we get surprised by them when facing an elite squad, horde attack, or special squads.
  
• Survivalist is still the best aura by-far for Guardsman but isn't overpowered. Buff the other two coherency auras.

EDIT 10/21/2023: The Occultist rework is 10/10. If they did this with every other hero in the game, it would help immensely. I'm still not happy about the relationship mechanic and frustrated by how annoying diseases are to remove given how bloody common they are too.

EDIT 12/16/2023: Binding and Blade is 10/10 as well. Please for the love of God rework the other heroes to be on-par with these two characters.

Played for a while, liked it at first but grew to get frustrated by it as time went on. Can only play it for a single run every couple of weeks now. I'll keep it short on what needs to get addressed before I'd consider recommending it in order of importance:

-Relationship system is absolutely terrible. If you have at least 2 good relationships with an ok team comp, the game beats itself. You'll just generate stupid amounts of buff tokens on your party to the point of doing near constant +50% damage, 50% dodge, passive stress heals, DoT clears, or outright healing 10% of a character's HP IN ADDITION TO using another hero's ability. If you have a bad relationship, it can severely stunt a run by debuffing other heroes for using an ability which in my experience the game seems dead set on putting on one of my heroes' core kit abilities that they're going to use multiple times a fight, like Leper's Chop or PD's Plague Grenade. Have 2 or more negative relationships? The run is probably dead. Just like college, if you don't invest in enough whiskey to get your party so drunk they get tricked into liking eachother you'll probably get a negative relationship or two.

-There is very little way to increase your heroes' speed outside of inn items that only last for 1 region, maybe 5 trinkets, maybe 1-2 quirks, and maybe 2-3 hero paths. This leads to your team getting out-sped in a lot of combat engagements. Even then, the number of times I've had an enemy overcome a speed deficit of 4 (i.e. LOL the enemy with 4 speed rolled a 6/6 on their hidden roll while my 8 speed hero rolled a 1/6 so they get to go first) is absolutely INFURIATING. While on this topic: REMOVE HASTENED ENEMIES! It's bad enough that the base speed on enemies are as high as they are, but Hastened Enemies effectively ensures that they will go first every turn.

-Diseases are way too common and cures for diseases are inconsistent/infrequent. About half of the diseases are crippling, some are inconsequential, and some are frustrating but manageable. Yet, you can only remove them from a Hospital node (which you might not even get to spawn or scouted so you easily miss it), a RNG inn item that you only get if Plague Doctor is in your team that only has a CHANCE of removing the disease, 5% chance to remove after getting hit from a specific trinket which you can only get from the Sluice, by getting hit by a specific attack from the Chirurgeon miniboss, a possible reward from a Creature Den node, or by finding a stagecoach item that might remove it 10% of the time when hitting a node. They also persist between runs, which is incredibly stupid.

-Almost all hero paths are either insanely good or mediocre, with most heroes only having 1 good path and even then some are completely outclassed by other heroes with a similar role. Monarch Leper, I REALLY want to like you but you're just a worse Tempest Leper 90% of the time and a slight upgrade 10% of the time. Same with Yellowhand Highwayman vs. Sharpshot Highwayman.

-Sprawl Region boss is stupidly easy while Shroud Region boss is aggravating in comparison. I would rather fight literally Death atop her pale horse than fight the Leviathan boss. The other two region bosses are fine so long as you understand how to mitigate their mechanics with a decent team comp/items.

-Act 1 & 2 Mountain bosses are a joke. Act 4 & 5 are perfectly fine. Act 3 is (still) one of the most frustratingly terrible gaming experiences I've had since Myst's mazerunner. Act 3's boss is fine now. He's not as fun as Act 4 or Act 5, but he's ok to fight now.

-Most trinkets are worthless (even the rare ones) with a few that are strong or incredibly strong.

-Most quirks have no meaningful impact with a few that are insanely impactful. This applies for both positive and negative quirks. Strangely (and irritatingly, given how ubiquitous diseases are), negative quirks (a conditioned psychological disorder) are much easier to remove than diseases once you invest candles into unlocking Inn items.

Disclaimer: I don't care about Versus Multiplayer in the slightest.

It's bad. Everyone knows why at this point. Don't buy the game for this gamemode, you won't enjoy it unless you're a Slaaneshi masochist.

The game is pretty good now and most of the races are pretty damn fun. There still are some glaring issues which I'll go into detail below. Biggest problem with the game is the Siege/Minor Settlement battles. They destroy the pacing of the game, whether it's because you taking half an hour to cheese a fight to prevent your army from taking copious amounts of damage or because you play it legitimately then take a high number of casualties prompting you to lose all momentum to replenish for 2 turns or possibly get defeated by another full strength AI army 1 region away over the endturn. If you value your sanity, mod sieges and minor settlement battles out of the game.


There's a few reasons for this. Primarily, it's because of the towers constantly being rebuilt and the game trying to urge you capture points during the siege. In theory, this mindset shouldn't be a problem. The reason it is a problem can be attributed to the fact that:

1.) Unit pathing being absolutely dreadful. You have to manually navigate units around EVERY SINGLE STUPID TURN on the siege map. If you don't, every unit trying to make it through a turn will all clump up at the shortest path of that turn and take forever to make the turn and unclump. You will spend more time micromanaging making 60°-90° turns than trying to focus on enemy movements or active combat.

2.) Core issues with map design/layout from TWW2 were not addressed in TWW3, the siege maps are simply bigger. Instead of having 2-3 plazas with a bunch of narrow footpaths leading to them in TWW2, TWW3 has 6-9 plazas with a bunch of narrow footpaths leading to them plus a couple of bridges on certain maps. I get that the idea is to encourage the attacking player to try to come into a point from 2-3 directions to surround & overwhelm the AI defender, but this isn't feasible given the pathing issues described in point #1. It also encourages the player to, once again, utilize damage magic to punish the AI defenders while they're in an enclosed footpath which works better if you put all your forces into one general area as opposed to attacking from multiple directions.

3.) Towers are too numerous since there are now additional buildable ones. Granted you can destroy them permanently now compared to at launch, but this just reinforces what was done by players in TWW2: use artillery to rip up the towers then try to do as much damage with ranged and magic to the enemy before pushing past the walls. It just costs more ammo to do so now. Alternatively, you can just kill all the fast enemies then have a couple of fast ground-based lords/heroes (usually on horseback) backcap the points you need to win the battle.



On a closing note, regional winds of magic was a mistake. Get unlucky with regional winds in your campaign? Too bad, -5 to -10 winds per turn unless you go into channeling stance (which some factions don't even have) until you hit the minimum of 20 which is usually about 2-5 casts tops. There aren't many ways to manipulate the Winds, it's either deal with it or channeling stance if you have it. Raise the minimum winds to like 40 or make the negative winds effects less detrimental (halve them PLEASE).

I like it. It's fun. It's a decent game, just not a good Fallout game. I'll continue to play it. But Christ alive, the main story was attrociously dull. The most interesting story/plot development came from your companions (Nick Valentine in particular was very well done). Plus the inconsistencies of lore, particularly those surrounding the power armor are the most frustrating. Take the following image for example:

https://community.bethesda.net/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-263533-237020/FO4_X-01_loading_screen.jpg

We see clearly here (and from past Fallout games) that the X-Class Power Armor was developed by the Enclave after the bombs fell. Yet why the hell is there a set of Nuka Cola Quantum X-01 Power Armor, that was clearly made pre-war, in existance when it is clearly established that the first sets were not created until after the bombs fell?

Also, the reasoning behind the T60 does not make much sense to me. You have the Anchorage Reclaimation in late 2076-early 2077. The T-51 model of Power Armor was prototyped and manufactured specifically to reclaim Alaska from the Chinese. Yet for whatever reason we see the U.S. Military not only came up with a new prototype (the T-60 Power Armor) but also mass produced and deployed it between January 2077 (when Anchorage was reclaimed) and October 2077 (when the bombs fell). There's no explanation as to why this was done. There's no real reasoning as to why you would so quickly make your previous pinnacle of Power Armor technology (the T-51 model) obsolete fiscally speaking, as well as the Resource War and the scarcity thereof. So why mass produce the T-60, much less design them given the scarcity of resources? It's bulkier than the T-51, therefore more resources to make, and you still have a nice pile of T-51's leftover from a war they had a very heavy hand in winning. Would it not make more sense to improve upon the existing T-51's and retrofit them instead?

Let Obsidian do the writing from here on out, m'kay?

FP Kiting Simulator 2015.