A New Day for Democracy, the new Helldivers 2 Patch. As both Arrowhead Game Studios and the game's players are licking their wounds following the big controversy over Sony account linkage last week, this may have arrived at a more subdued reception than usual. Slow down, the body in the road, and reverse review bombing, which ended with a huge u-turn.

Such a drama would be forgiven for forgetting that galactic wars are still going on, and Arrowhead's latest patch addresses some annoyance trimmed along the way: but also includes one quiet revelation.

Remember that Helldivers collectively wiped out 24 billion bugs within 20 hours."It's a great day for democracy, but even at the time, some wondered if game master Joel was putting his thumb up to help this massive order. Properly enough, it turned out that there was a bug in the system:

"Major orders with 'Kill task' now track scores correctly. Previously, we counted the entire team's kills 1 time for each player.This means that the score is multiplied by the number of people participating in the mission.This has now been fixed."

Well, well, well. So the game was artificially inflating the total of team kills by multiplying the number of players in a given mission by up to 3 times the number of bug kills. Killing half a billion terminoids doesn't seem that impressive, but at least next time we'll know we've done it properly.

Elsewhere, following widespread reports that helldivers were fairly consistently blowing themselves and their teammates in a wide radius, the shrapnel effect of the eruption was removed and replaced by explosive damage. Another unintended weapon effect, the Punisher Plasma rifle, which bounces off your own energy shield, was interesting, but has also been modified.

For reasons known only to Arrowhead, Shriekers have a buff in sight and hearing range, even though they have already found you from a considerable distance. And there are some pretty nerfs that I'm not very happy with, mainly "Helldivers can no longer land on tall rocks in the 'Horde Defense Mission'" and "Helldivers can no longer land on bug pillars" in the Deactivated Terminid Control System mission. Landing on high ground and blowing off enemies from relative safety is a perfectly effective tactic!

This patch introduced its own problem, but has now been fixed. The short version is that the patch arrived yesterday and fixed the whole range of crashes, including what I kept getting when I tried to shut down the game. It has fixed so many crash instances, in fact, that it has managed to introduce a bunch of new ones, players have found their clients not much more stable than pre-patching. Arrowhead today issued a fix that seems to have stopped most of these crashes: I just launched the game and it has been working successfully

as above, fixing issues like how friends appear, social menus, non-hosts kick players, and more. Among these, "helldivers may not be able to stand up from crouching when surrounded by enemies" must admit that beatdowns felt like a feature because they can really be very brutal, but bleeding enemies "may not be able to stand up without proceeding with personal orders." To root out the mission remains annoying."Oh, and now, "the explosion will not break your limbs (except when you fly to the rock)" — so everyone moans about grenades in a few weeks

Until the missteps over Sony's account, the Helldivers2 launch was overwhelmingly successful, and thanks to the simultaneous PC launch, it was already in history in the United States. It's PlayStation's 7th highest-grossing game in the world. The game's next warbond will land tomorrow and make the deceleration effect a thing of the past with a "motivational shock," but in the wider galactic war, there's one question that's bothering me and others: Why is the whole planet turning green?