PlayStation have finally come to their senses and rolled back a lot of the unpopular PC region locking that’s been stopping folks in various parts of the world enjoying a bunch of games. It looks like one of those titles, Helldivers 2, could finally be getting a cape players have craved for a year or so as a result.
Yep, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani has teased deploying the review bomb-themed cape that first emerged as a meme following the backlash to PlayStation attempting to change the game’s PSN account linking rules last year. We’ve known the cape was a real item the studio had made for a while now, but with the region locking still ongoing, Arrowhead have opted to keep it locked away for months on end.
Taking to Helldivers 2’s Discord server not long after a mass removal of countries from the restricted lists of several PlayStation-affiliated PC games was spotted on June 13th, Jorjani wrote: “It was all our good friends at PlayStation”.
He went on to ask players to consider revisiting any negative reviews of the game left solely because of the region locking controversy, writing: “It would be nice if folks would change their review as a result of this. But it’s not a must if you don’t wanna. It’s a point of pride for the team to see their hard work recognized with a higher user review score.” Glancing at Steam, it looks like a good number have done just that over the weekend.
Naturally, that got folks wondering whether they might soon be getting the review bomb cape, with Jorjani responding to a question about it: “I’ll talk to the team next week. But we always felt it was something to give away once regions returned. PS has been working hard on this so a cape to celebrate is in order.”
So, a garment that features the section of Steam’s reviews graph showing just how many folks were taking out their PSN account linking frustrations on Helldivers 2 last May sounds like it could finally be incoming. If you’re wondering why this is a thing people would want, my best answer is that the Helldivers 2 community loves a good in-joke, so came up with designs for the cape, then started properly campaigning for it become a real thing once Arrowhead acknowledged these sketches.
If you’re curious as to what it’d look like, here’s a teaser Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt tweeted out just over 13 months ago, later confirming that the studio was just waiting for the right time to release it – basically, once the region locking controversy was actually over. Assuming it does finally arrive, it’ll definitely be a fitting way to commemorate a long overdue change.