Arrowhead Games is known for its propensity to bring exciting top-down two-stick shooters to gamers everywhere, with its first foray into the genre with Magicka back in 2011. Since then, the studio has seen a streak of co-op successes from that very point of view, even with the original Helldivers that was released in 2015.
After I was able to dig my claws into Helldivers 2 at SIE Headquarters in San Mateo, CA, I was able to catch up with the Founder and Director of Arrowhead Game Studios, Johan Pilestedt, on what makes Helldivers 2 much more than a sequel, the importance of a thriving community, and how Arrowhead Game Studios was able to make a move from top-down isometric shooting to third person extraction shooter.
For context purposes, I should note Johan gave us a rally speech on Defending Democracy before we started our hands-on session with Helldivers 2, and it was nothing short of inspiring.
First off, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and discuss all manners of Helldivers 2, I noticed the mention of Starship Troopers‘ ‘background characters’ as a major influence for being a Helldiver during your call-to-action speech before diving in to play. So the question is, like in the film, can Helldivers shoot holes in the larger bugs and toss grenades into the holes?
Johan Pilestedt: When you do damage to the carapace of a bug, the carapace wears down and breaks off, so Helldivers do damage to the shell, it breaks off and reveals weak parts underneath. So we have drawn inspiration [laughs] from Starship Troopers in that sense.
There’s so much in Helldivers 2 aside from inspirations that make it unique, like a huge selection of customization options. Will guest characters make an appearance?
Johan Pilestedt: Potentially. It’s something that we’re always discussing, but you never know what can happen. We intend to support this game for as long as we possibly can. My background is really from the modding scene back when Half-Life and Quake modding took off, so my perspective on what it’s like to be in a really good gaming community comes from that.
I think it’s a community that has the seeds of a continuous evolution of the game, where there’s a dialogue between the developers and the community, so in the end, it’s the things WE expand the game into. So, if the community has a lot of great ideas or thoughts, we want to go in a certain direction and we want to be able to try to surprise and delight the community with updates that are appropriate. So, in that sense, it depends.
I’ve noticed while playing the original Helldivers, I maxed out solo-play difficulty four. I couldn’t play harder than that without teammates. Is Helldivers 2 designed with community in mind like that? Is there a wall that you’ll hit eventually without teammates?
Johan Pilestedt: Yeah, pretty much. But it depends. We have added up to difficulty level 50 in Helldivers [original], so we thought this one needs to be difficult as well, one guy in the community that soloed it with melee only no strats [stratagems in Helldivers 2]!
How do you even do that solo?
Johan Pilestedt: I don’t know. It’s crazy what the community does, which is always inspiring to us. How can people be so good at this game? So, in Helldivers 2, there’s a little bit more of ‘stealth mechanics’ in place. So, it means that Helldivers can play in a sneakier way when you’re soloing, which should, in theory, allow you to go pretty far during solo play.
But our core design philosophy, when it comes to cooperative shooters, is that we want players to want to play with other players. So, if you’ve thought, “It would be great if I had a friend that joined me,” that’s what we’re looking for. There’s mechanics in this game that help Helldivers join games, there’s even one where players can throw out an SOS Beacon in game, and it basically puts you at the top of the matchmaking list for anybody that’s looking for a game.
So, if you’re having a really hard time in solo play, Helldivers 2 encourages players to throw out the SOS Beacon if it gets too difficult. This way, you can get a random in that’s actively searching for a game, too!
So, it is as easy to dive in and out of games in Helldivers 2 as in the original?
Johan Pilestedt: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve [laughs] made it even easier than the original.
How is that even possible?
Johan Pilestedt: [laughs] The Galactic War page displays more information when you press square, and if that’s one that you want to join, you can just jump right in by pressing a button, just like the original. But, more information and depth are displayed this time around.
When you look at the planet’s surface, you can see other games various Helldivers are engaging in on that planet. So, if a player wants a harder mission to join against the bugs, it will show that on the planet info screen, which operations are actively in progress by the community on the planet.
I see, I did notice more information while looking through the menus a little bit, and I noticed there are microtransactions included. There’s this taboo around that, so the question is, is everything in Helldivers 2 unlockable without microtransactions?
Johan Pilestedt: Everything is! So, in Helldivers 2, we use virtual currency as the means of additional monetization for the game. And really, the way that I envision this is we continuously develop it [Helldivers 2], release free updates for the entire community, and we’re never going to put anything that you need behind a paywall.
All of the challenge content and base content on new missions, enemies, objectives, and so forth, those are the things that we want to ensure that we GIVE to the community, while cosmetics, variations of weapons, and potentially stratagems are things that you’ll unlock through the war bonds [seasonal rewards]. The original war bond, which is the one that comes with a base game, includes metals [in-game currency] to unlock stuff with, and in the future we will release additional war bonds.
War Bonds are similar in a sense to season passes. But we want them to be permanent, or they are permanent in the game. So, if you start playing the game again in two years, you can pick up any of the available bonds and progress through any of them at your leisure.
You can buy these using Super Credits, which are the currency that actual people use in the world of Helldivers 2. Players can find the currency in the world, and you can get it through actually progressing through one of the war bonds. But generally, a player that is playing the game will be able to buy the additional war bonds released later on with the currency they find in the game. If players WANT to top that up with VC [premium currency] than with super credits, then you’re free to do so.
That option just helps us continue development long term. One thing that I want to mention around that, we’re really big on ethical monetization. We won’t force you to buy or force advertisements. I want players to feel if they really like this game, they’ll feel okay with choosing to spend extra if they want to.
That’s a good stance to have!
Johan Pilestedt: It’s trying to be fair and not like shorter business models of games. The games industry, of course, is constantly evolving. But I think that it just comes down to ensuring that the game is as good as it possibly can be and that you don’t feel like you’re getting half of a game as to what’s expected.
Why did Arrowhead Game Studios decide to shift from top-down to third-person in Helldivers 2?
Johan Pilestedt: That’s a really good question. So after we made Helldivers, we were really happy with the way that the game turned out. The dynamics, the team play and so forth. Really proud of that product. And we started talking as an organization, we’ve sort of gotten a little bit pigeonholed into top-down development going from Magicka to Gauntlet to Helldivers, and really our core principle in making video games, it’s not necessarily about the perspective it’s more about the emotion and the game experience. We wanted something where you get to laugh a lot and be surprised and have, you know, those crazy moments!
In Helldivers, we started talking about the visceral reality and intensity of the game. It is extremely intense in the format that it was, but it would be so awesome to be able to be there on the ground and play the game in THAT way. So, we actually did a test in the original Helldivers, where we pulled down the camera, and we had to control the game from there. It looked funky, you know, without having the sky maps or anything. But it gave us the confidence to say, “You know what? This would actually be a lot of fun from this perspective, so let’s talk to PlayStation and see if there is something that they’re interested in!”
They were interested, so it became an opportunity for us to double down on the visceral reality and intensity, and to a certain degree, the slapstick comedy was more effective in third-person than the previous top-down perspective.
By playing Helldivers 2, it makes me think ‘where did the sequel go?’ The advancements feel like this could be Helldivers 3 rather than 2, and I was wondering how you guys made such improvements. Something as easy as walking with the map open is second nature in Helldivers 2 as opposed to the original, where it was impossible.
Johan Pilestedt: We had it like that in the first game, yeah! We had it, so if you had a map open, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to move around well, but nowadays, we have smartphones and Google Maps. We thought that was how we had to do it this time.
In the original, we had inspiration from WWII, like you unfold a map and point to spots and suggest that’s where you should go. In Helldivers 2, it’s more like, “Let’s pull out the smartphone and see where we should attack.” So there’s definitely that real-world interest in game design philosophy and how it transitions into the sequel.
There were a lot of changes that had to be made for the shift to third person, but we believe the experience is intact and elevated in most ways with the perspective change. It allows us, as developers, to create bigger depth in the game’s mechanics and how the game was created. There’s examples of that, the armor system in the original required players to shoot center mass against enemies, but in Helldivers 2 there is finer depth like specific weak points that players can exploit which wouldn’t have worked outside of third person.
For instance, the bots that you fought against in the preview, if you shoot the right arm, you can essentially shoot their gun off. We had one developer who got really good at NOT doing headshots but arm shots. So, he would dismember both arms on bot after bot so they couldn’t shoot back. They [the bot enemies] were just walking up to him, trying to kick him without their arms.
How important is that depth to Arrowhead?
Johan Pilestedt: It all comes down to the story that you’re able to tell after you play the game. The moments like, “Yeah this bot was about to shoot me, but I shot its gun arm off and then he tried to stomp on me while I was crawling around on the ground!”
You can actually retell the story in the same way as it would happen in a movie, and being able to retell gameplay events as if they were a movie, but it happened organically through the play experience, that is extremely important to us as a studio.
You mentioned the importance of community before, and Helldivers 2 appears to have its own identity like a really fun inside joke, is that intentional?
Johan Pilestedt: Absolutely! I think we were surprised by how well the community takes to the idea of getting to, you know, BE the bad guys in the universe and lean into that. Because, yeah, Helldivers, they, of course, SAY that they’re good guys, but really… they’re not.
So it’s fun to be able to play on that side and be like ‘the henchmen of the Empire’ or any of those kinds of obvious bad guys. Then the community just took that to whole new levels, where whenever somebody complained about something, or when we post things online, the community is like, “Well, that sounds an awful lot like something a cyborg sympathizer would say,” shutting down legitimate complaints about something, the Helldivers community comes in and sort of berates and steps in, in a joking way.
Is there a genuine ‘antagonist,’ a ‘Big Bad’ in Helldivers 2?
Johan Pilestedt: Not really. There might be overtime. One of the things that we wanted to do with Helldivers 2 is change the way that the Galactic War works. In Helldivers 1, it was mostly a thought experiment of what happens if we make a global co-op game where everybody pushes threats back; this time around, we took that to a new level.
There’s still that element of pushing enemies back and taking control over sectors in space, together with the entire community. But on top of that, we also added the functionality that we call internally ‘the Game Master.’ It’s based on the thought process of how games are organized in tabletop pen-and-paper role-playing games. So you have the Game Master that is running the show, and they put on or expand upon the story the entire game for the gaming group.
This time around, the gaming group is the entire community, and the Game Master is a team at Arrowhead Game Studio. So, we have our story arcs planned out for the next three months or so on how the story will evolve. There will be repeated characters that have opinions of different things. They may issue orders and the like. These characters will, based on the political landscape of the community, dictate that we need to do certain things within the galaxy. They’ll show up as ‘orders’ in the game for the community to do and complete together.
What was the inspiration behind the enemies? We have Terminator–like bots. We have the bugs that feel like they’re yanked straight from Starship Troopers. What else Is there? And where did you come up with the designs?
Johan Pilestedt: A lot of everything is grounded in pop culture. I mean, we’re massive nerds in every sense of the sense of the word. We watch a lot of movies, and we do a lot of references to all of these things that we grew up with. So, a lot of it is based on things that we have liked over the years. There’s not one single reference for any of the factions or any of their enemies or armours.
It’s just like, remember that scene in Terminator where a gunship chases them around? Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like that in the game? And then, that brief basically goes to the design team to sort of figure out, “What does that mean for the art style of Helldivers 2?” Some of the characters that we’ve created have inspiration, but everything relates or draws a parallel to pop culture in one way or another.
It has a little bit of ‘seven-in-the-morning’ cartoon style to it, except the main characters go and die constantly.
It’s funny you mentioned a Helldiver is like a ‘side character dying in the background,’ it somehow makes you feel less important but still important.
Johan Pilestedt: In moments, you CAN truly become the main character with heroics!
But then you return to side character status?
Johan Pilestedt: Yeah! [laughs] And sometimes, you know, you can get really far into the game, and people get really, really competent, they actually become main character-esque, because you can then survive all of these situations. It’s just that you need to pay so much attention to everything that’s going on all the time.
You need a deep fundamental understanding of how the game systems operate to become the main character. Plus, you also need to actually be able to pull those moves off kinesthetically and requiring all of those three from a player to become that kind of hero-level character or hero-style player is not something that you do overnight. It’s more like 1000 or 2000 hours, and it’s something that we’re generally very proud of with this title is the systematic nature of it.
I think we played one mission that was in the nighttime, and in the nighttime mission, we never killed anybody. Enemy vision range is reduced quite significantly in darkness, so you can stealth more easily during night missions. If you shoot, though, the muzzle flash creates a light that enemies can detect you with.
So enemies can see muzzle flashes at normal range. And it’s just these key things that we hope that the community will figure out over time, there are so many of these hidden mechanics in the game. It’s not required for you to play. It’s just that extra depth that experienced players can utilize to their favour.
Considering friendly fire, is there a PvP mode in Helldivers 2?
Johan Pilestedt: No. It’s one of the core philosophies that we have in regard to the game experience that we make. We believe that as soon as we introduce [heavy] competitiveness into the game, there’s some light competitiveness with the stat screen, ‘I killed the most, and I didn’t shoot my friends’ and so forth. You can bash each other or shoot each other or whatever.
But, when we actually made it into like a goal to be competitive, with other people in the game, we noticed that the toxicity in the community went up. And looking at the original Helldivers game, we had very low toxicity in general—people were extremely friendly.
And it really helped the community and is something that, I think, is something that I wish more and more games had. Like, you know, this humble and gentle community that likes playing video game theatre, it shouldn’t be politics. There shouldn’t be animosity in it.
And if someone gets pompous or toxic, and they’re like, “You’re not playing right!” you can just shoot them!
Johan Pilestedt: [Laughs] Exactly right! So we’re trying to foster a really healthy community where people feel welcome to play at all different skill levels. And there’s nothing that prevents an inexperienced player from dropping into a new scheme and helping them out. And we saw this a lot in Helldivers One. We’re seeing the same kind of behaviour and hilarity ensue in Helldivers 2, as well when we do beta tests or otherwise. People really want to help the other members of the community succeed.
Actually, I noticed I didn’t answer your question about ‘Helldivers 3’ before, so I’ll do that now. This game took a long while to develop. It’s been eight years since Helldivers. Originally, there would have been a ‘Helldivers 2’, but it kept being swallowed up by the full game we have developed now. The potential we continued to see after development, ‘this would be really cool if we did something like this!’ so we kept building on it. We continuously made it bigger and bigger in several increments. We’ve gone through the phase of ‘making the film,’ so to speak.
There are so many great moments to be had, and it’s fun to watch it play as well. We can’t wait for fans to dive in and see how they play.
Helldivers 2 launches on February 8 for PS5 and PC.
