Helldivers 2 devs casually reveal they're quadrupling the Railgun's durable damage, while CCO Pilestedt says kit like the Recoilless Rifle will become a 'delete key', and oh, do I like the sound of that

Helldivers 2 has been, over the course of its turbulent lifespan, criticised for a couple of things—firstly, its heavily armoured enemies take a little too long to murder, and are downright impossible to kill without specific equipment. Secondly, whenever anyone's having a bit too much fun, the weapon in question seems to get nerfed.

Arrowhead Games' CCO—formerly CEO—Johan Pilestedt took to Discord to talk a little about the design philosophies fuelling an upcoming patch, which is coming to the horde shooter September 17.

Said update promises to address several major bugbears, such as restoring the flamethrower to its former glory.Moreover, it'll be aiming to make Helldivers 2 more 'hoo'-rah, less 'getting ragdolled by a dozen chargers because you had the gall to die right after calling down the weapon you needed to kill them with'-rah. Which is good, because that latter option's a mouthful.

«The update that we are launching now is a much larger holistic take to realign the gameplay,» Pilestedt writes. «The reason why so many of you found excitement in some tools such as the flamethrower, railgun, [and] Eruptor, [we] realised, is because they could deal with heavily armored enemies much more effectively than they were supposed to … the changes we needed to make were a bit larger than just getting the flamethrower back to where it was; But also getting other weapons up to the level that where you (and I) feel they all should've been from the start.»

Essentially, the way Pilestedt lays it out, Helldivers 2 has an issue where specialised tools aren't just good at what they do, but mandatory to do it in the first place—with every other weapon being pea-shooters by comparison. Instead, Arrowhead wants to make weapons broadly more effective while also making specialised anti-tank weapons like the Spear stronger against their intended foes.

A good example of this dropped today on the game's Twitter, actually—the railgun is going to get a beefy upgrade, quadrupling its