Helldivers 2 became a co-op hit seemingly the moment it launched earlier this year. Its evolving campaign wildly fun bug-squashing action earned it hordes of fans and made it one of the most talked-about games around for a good long while. To be fair, it’s still getting talked about a heck of a lot but much of what’s being said now comes from players dissatisfied with — well, basically every change developer Arrowhead Studios makes to the game. So when a community manager recently posted on Reddit to explain why some updates were taking a while and gently suggest that taking a break sometimes is okay, it went about as well as you might expect.
Months ago, community manager Thomas Petersson, better known to players as Twinbeard, made a Reddit post originally made to explain changes that would be coming to Helldivers 2’s enemy spawn rates. Just this week, the post received new replies from players unhappy with more recent changes, including one user saying, “I’ll be moving on to another game.”
Petersson returned to address players’ displeasure with the state of the game and the speed of Arrowhead’s response, noting that much of the studio’s staff just returned from vacation, and saying, “it takes time to swing a large ship around.”
He goes on to detail some of Arrhowhead’s plans to fix issues players have identified, ending his post by saying, “I hope you'll stick around, but there's nothing wrong with playing a game and revisiting it at a later state, especially a live service one that's being worked on continuously. I hope your summer's been great so far, and that I've been seeing you on the battlefield again — sooner or later.”
While responses were by and large angry that Arrowhead hadn’t yet fixed each of their individual quibbles with Helldivers 2, Petersson’s reminder that just because a game is always online doesn’t mean players have to be is well worth listening to. Live-service games are made to feel essentially infinite, offering so much repeatable content that players never have to give up their favorite game.
But while that can be good for players who are enjoying themselves and want more of the same — or just need an online activity to do with friends — it can also magnify the problems that players run into. Experiencing a glitch or just a dull mission is simple enough to overlook if it happens once, but the nature of live-service games means anything you find annoying will almost certainly come up again as long as you keep playing. Many live-service games are also built to incentivize playing as much as possible, through things like currency earned by continuously playing or limited-time events that players can totally miss out on if they happen to be away while it’s live.
That makes it easy to understand why some players are annoyed with what they see as problems in Helldivers 2, but it still doesn’t justify the endless gripes and outright anger some display. Just because any individual player doesn’t like how something works in a game doesn’t mean it actually needs to be fixed, and as Petersson points out, making major changes to a live-service game when they do need to happen is a huge undertaking. Both of those facts just so happen to be great reasons to heed Petersson’s advice — put oh so politely — that it might be a good idea to put down the controller once in a while.
Petersson isn’t the first developer to suggest that players might want to reevaluate their relationship with their favorite online games, either. Speaking on a Blizzard Entertainment livestream, Diablo 4 associate game director Joe Piepiora once told players to “take a break to play something else for a little while” waiting for new seasonal content to release. Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida had similar things to say about players who had lost motivation to play every day, saying “Come back and play to your heart’s content when the major patch kicks in, then stop it to play other games before you get burnt out, and then come back for another major patch.”
Some players might not be happy to be told to hit pause, but taking a break from even a game you’re enjoying has plenty of benefits. For one, it keeps you from becoming the kind of person who demands developers cater to your every whim, but it can also genuinely make games more enjoyable. Taking a break from a game and coming back can help those persistent annoyances seem less of a bother, or give them time to actually be patched out. As the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and you may find that taking breaks even from games you’re enjoying can help you appreciate what made them great in the first place.
