Helldivers 2 players share theories on what will happen after the 60-day roadmap is complete

Arrowhead Game Studios announced that they were working on a 60-day roadmap to rectify many of the changes made in the Escalation of Freedom update, particularly surrounding nerfs, while also fixing many of the issues that have been plaguing Helldivers 2 for many months. While we do know that the next update should be focused on buffs, it is still nowhere in sight and it has been revealed that the 60-days haven’t even begun despite the roadmap being announced two weeks ago.

Players took to the Helldivers 2 sub-Reddit to discuss what they believe will happen following the 60-day roadmap, with the poster saying “I am genuinely curious what people are really expecting or predicting where Pile and the CEO to take this game from here on out.”

U/HappySpam kicked things off by predicting that the Helldivers 2 developers will “make 3 weapons and stratagems better, everyone will be happy, then management goes on winter vacation and someone in the dev team drops a MASSIVE stinker of a patch that nerfs the Spear, then also goes off on Winter vacation, and the community catches on fire again.”

Not everyone is expecting Arrowhead to not deliver, some players believe that the developers can still turn things around, but they will stumble in their efforts, including U/Greaterdivinity who said “They’ll ship a few decent patches. They’ll ship a few bad patches. They’ll come up with some plans that work, some that don’t. Things will continue slowly improving while they bumble along the way,” they said.

They then stated fbF they are “absolutely not expecting the studio to radically change its culture and quality of work over the span of 2-3 months, especially after the past 6 months of the game and the years that at least folks like Pilestedt have been in leadership. If it’s better than that, rad, awesome. But based on past performance and history my expectations are pretty low.”

U/Forsaken-Fruit-1161 made some really great points, highlighting that Helldivers 2 is likely doomed to fail regardless of the outcome and this style of game will never sustain the level of players that we saw during the early months.

“It will end up like any other horde shooter game on the market, hovering around 10,000 players on a good day. Initially, I was pleased that a PvE game was finally receiving some well-deserved recognition, but that notion has since been proven wrong. The game is good, but it’s not something to lament over when it eventually finds its rightful place. The promise of 60 days is a sham and should be recognized as such. There is no reality in which that amount of work can be accomplished in such a complex system without any missteps in just 60 days. If anyone reading this is still on the fence about taking a break, do it now, because this game needs about two more years of development time.”

U/warmowed also believes it is inevitable that Helldivers 2 will fall off into obscurity as time goes on, and it will end up being a distant memory for a lot of players, noting that they “think this will be a slow death and possibly drop below Helldivers 1 player count. I did a D10 op this morning and got 78 impact, while that feels nice for me it is a stark reminder of how empty the game is. Also story wise we really haven’t had much progression so the dnd story aspect of the galactic war is heavily underutilized and that is a big downer. I wish they would just let us build our own ops or have galactic war progression pay out each mission because if the story is pointless I really would just prefer a level select screen.”

Finally, U/Peregrine_Falcon believes that we will see a never-ending cycle of the game in a similar state to it is now, with the developers releasing reactionary updates in response to a downturn in players to regain popularity. Then when it dips again they will repeat the process.

“Let’s be honest, we all know what’s going to happen. They’ll patch some bugs. The player base will dip to below 10k. Then they’ll buff a bunch of weapons and stratagems and add more bugs in the process. The player base will rejoice and soar up to almost 100k again. And then two weeks later another patch will nerf more weapons, the player base will collapse, and Pilestedt will make another heartfelt post on Discord about how sorry and tired they all are and how they’ll try to do better going forward.”

Regardless of whether Helldivers 2 falls off or not, the good news is that the game is unlikely to die. The first Helldivers game was released back in 2015 and it is still fully functional today, and even the studio’s 2011 Magicka RPG is still active and playable despite being over a decade old. So, even if you’re the sole survivor of the Galactic War, you should have no worries regarding whether you will still be able to play, which is a great example of how live-service gaming should be.

While we wait to see the outcome of the 60-day roadmap, the Galactic War continues and right now, players are tasked with exterminating 500,000 Automatons. If the community is successful, we will be given a new Orbital Napalm Barrage Stratagem as a reward, which could be a great option for fighting the Terminids. Since most of the community favors the Terminids, you may need to alter your loadout to fight the robot army. To help with this, I highly recommend checking out our Helldivers 2 best weapons guide and best armor guide.