Comically vast Helldivers 2 patch adds to the game's Galactic strategy map while making stealth easier and armoured enemies fewer

The latest Helldivers 2 patch is memorably titled 01.000.400, but for my money, it's hovering on the brink of being one of your gold-varnished "X.0" updates of note. It adds a fair few mechanics and makes various substantial adjustments to Arrowhead and Sony's liberty-humping, cheerily xenocidal squad shooter.

These include making supply lines and attack origins visible on the Galactic War map, so you can (in theory) cut off invasions at their root, together with an absolute slew of stratagem and weapon balancing changes, an accompanying tsunami of tweaks for Automaton and Terminid enemies, and a positive landslide of, errrrm, reworks for planetary maps. Also, invite-only lobbies! Though they're currently only localised in English.

It's late here, I still have jetlag from SGF and Geoff Keighley or one of his agents seems to have given me some kind of plague, thankfully not Covid, so permit me to dive in and pull out a few things from the full patch notes, rather than committing to a comprehensive digest. One thing that catches my eye is that they've adjusted enemy spawning so that you'll get fewer heavily armoured enemies, such as Bile Titans or Hulks, and more smaller, squishier enemies, with a view to making your tactics less monotonous. "Our intent is to ease up on the demand of anti-tank weapons and by having more of the other enemies give a better incentive for the group to bring stratagems and weapons that take care of hordes," the developers explain.

This desire for variety also informs their tweaks to the game's Stratagems. "With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more possibility for variety in the loadouts," the post goes on. "We also changed a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level."

As regards the above Galactic War stuff, Arrowhead note that "supply lines were previously not shown on the Galactic War map to reduce clutter and improve readability". The developers are, nonetheless, keen to expose the game's table-toppy metagame workings to players and encourage us all to strategise properly rather than dogpiling whichever world starts trending on Twitter. "You will now also be able to see which planet an attack is originating from, potentially allowing for the community to stop the attack at its source," the Steam post suggests.

Last but not least, the cavalry is finally coming for stealthy solo Helldivers such as myself, as the game's plants will now actually screen people from view. "Vegetation that's large enough to slow the player now has an extra function," the post reads. "When inside the vegetation helldivers will be harder to detect, reducing their detection range by enemies. This effect stacks with other detection reducing effects such as nighttime, being crouched or prone, or things such as the scout armor passive."

A meaty update, by all that's Super-Democratic! I'm sure the internet's Pandemonium-Dippers will find much to chew over and complain about, for the cycle of feedback and updates must continue to spin, though hopefully it'll be nothing as severe as what happened when Sony insisted everybody get a PSN account and effectively banned whole countries from the game. The only thing it's missing, really, is a new enemy faction of some kind.