Helldivers 2 is (so far) THE AAA-like live service game made for me. This has never happened before. Other than randos with voice chat fully off, I am playing exclusively with people who won't crumple at the sort of things I say and want to talk about, excepting cases where I Am The Problem. The people I've played with know what's up, that the game is absolutely taking the piss out of everything it seems it can, within the confines of what it is. Even saw a mod post screenshotted from the official discord with what looks like a clear jab at zionist propaganda (actually kind of stunning if I'm reading this right)? I want to enjoy the game, enjoy the community (well really specific slices of it at least), engage with the game on more than a surface level, and revel in the chaos inherent to and resulting from what it is.
There's a problem. I am not good at military shooters. I am not very familiar with live service games. I am not familiar with navigating everchanging metas. I played call of duty a single time and decided I didn't need to give it another chance. My favorite 3D shooters are Risk of Rain 2 (questionable how much I'm willing to go back even after the first DLC) and Metroid Prime ("shooter"). I Do Not Know What I'm Doing. The game's been out only a couple months, but what seems to be considered as the juicy, rewards-laden "medium" difficulty is already absurd to me. I don't know how I'm supposed to play this, even if I could get "good" at it.
I feel like I just don't "get" most multiplayer video games, or even types of multiplayer video games. The perceived skill floor still feels so high, and it feels so often that actual human connection is meant to be an occasional side-effect of these kinds of designs. And so...
I think I've known for a while that my favorite modern online multiplayer video game is...Among Us. Granted it's been quite a while since I played it, and I played it with COWORKERS (it was a good thing at the time I think), but it felt like one of the most "human" multiplayer video games I'd ever played. They went and added a bunch of the live service trappings later on, it seems, and made some overly convoluted maps, but I can only speak from my own experience.
The intense, semi-serious, farcical shouting matches were something else. So vicious but seemingly never inflicting sustained damage. Yeah, that's werewolf, mafia, etc., but that's why it WORKS to me. I'm not even like, a particularly perceptive or clever person, but at some point I fell kind of hard for the "social deduction" game framework (implementation and context are super relevant though). There's probably some kind of deeply flawed and toxic design and reinforcement at play here, but it absolutely feels like Something Other Games Do Not Offer.
The other ones I really like are ones I grew up with (local Halo deathmatches with absurd rules and clueless players, Mario Kart 64 (Wii was really good for a while but my faith is shaken), Mario Party (theoretically I will love some of the ones before 8 which was cool but eventually nearly bored me to tears), Smash Brothers Brawl which I was hopelessly bad at, and...Pokemon Stadium 2 minigames SPECIFICALLY). And also jackbox, etc., which feel like in some ways an actually meaningfully better evolution of CAH and the uninspired of its ilk. (oh my god I need to play more Monikers)
There's definitely space here in the survival and co-op campaign spaces for things I like, and I've gotten some of that before, but it also feels like my tastes are fundamentally at odds with what these sorts of games can offer as they are now. I really do want to try Elden Ring co-op, but probably only because I didn't play a lot of "Dark Souls 4" and I want to play and discover a co-op game that feels less like a goofy comedy, and with that mod I can be extremely picky (but it bothers me that I can only do that with a mod).
Just, what do I do here?