Helldivers 2’s game director speaks on a frantic first year and the future of the Galactic War

Helldivers 2 has reached its first anniversary, marking what’s been a wild year for Arrowhead Game Studios. The co-op action shooter took off as soon as it was released on Feb. 8, 2024, enjoying an explosive launch with hundreds of thousands more players than Arrowhead expected. I’ve been logging in consistently throughout the first year, joining the Helldivers on the front lines of the evolving Galactic War. That initial momentum has hit a few obstacles throughout the year, but after some careful balance patches and narrative events, I’m optimistic about the future of Helldivers 2. The game looks very different a full year after launch, with a third faction, the Automaton-bombing Democracy Space Station, and a massive spore cloud cooking out in Terminid space. Polygon spoke with Mikael Eriksson, game director on Helldivers 2, about lessons learned over the game’s lifespan so far — and a glimpse at what comes next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Polygon: Helldivers 2 enjoyed a popular launch, and an unexpectedly large player base to manage. How did the surprise success affect the first year’s development? Mikael Eriksson: The launch success, the sheer magnitude of players, and the Sauron’s Eye of the world shifting to look at us was beyond anything that we had anticipated. We had to scramble to bring things under control, and it took us quite a long time after launch to get to a point where we were in control of the situation. The first three to six months were not at all as we had expected. At least 50% of plans were different, because we had to shift so much to focus on build quality. So many of our devs were thrown into making sure players could access the game, that we didn’t have crashes and bugs, and so forth. We imagined a ceiling of 150,000 concurrent users at maximum, and this was considered very optimistic. So we didn’t build for any more capacity, then we had way more players than that. Even if our back-end team did an amazing job of raising the ceiling up to, like, 300,000, it filled up in minutes. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25323574/helldivers_2_super_broadcast.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] A lot of coordination in Helldivers 2 is done in external platforms like Discord or Reddit. Are there plans to introduce in-game ways for players to give battle orders or set up a plan of action for an invasion? Definitely. I love the community and the posting on social forums; we don’t want them to stop doing that because it’s all amazing. If anything, I’m going to give a shoutout to all the hilarious memes. It’s the best thing we do after dropping major updates; scrolling through all the uploaded memes makes my day every time. But we do have plans to improve this in-game as well, to give players the ability to group up and form plans and so forth. I can’t say too much right now, but we’re expanding on it a lot. An early tension between players, I think, was the difference between the highly tactical players who were playing to test themselves and the goofy players who love the Looney Tunes-style antics of being blown up or crushed by a friendly Hellpod. Was this something Arrowhead had to reconcile, and if so, what was that like? We’re a goofy bunch. Personality-wise, we like to make people laugh, and that’s one of our main goals we have with the game. Games are more fun together, and when you’re experiencing challenging, intense moments together in the game and you die unexpectedly, that can really make you laugh. We struggled a lot leading up to launch in just making death be fun in our game. For a long time, people were frustrated and didn’t like when they died unexpectedly. We wanted that to be the case, for you to be super invested and lean forward on the couch and give your best effort to succeed at the mission and so forth, and then we wanted you to die unexpectedly, because that’s fun. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25301237/obl74yt8.png?quality=90&strip=all] Our creative director, Johan [Pilestedt], said once that the main metric he’s passionate about is laughter per minute. In that sense, we’re like a party game. It’s important to us that when you’re playing, you do laugh, you do experience these hilarious, emergent moments. We don’t think that’s at odds with being precise about functionality and weapon design in the game. We have a lot of players that care deeply about the intimate details of how things should work, like weapon design and systems, the recoil and the way bullets can behave, and so forth. One of the reasons that’s important to us is believability is incredibly important in our game, and weapon functionality is part of that, and friendly fire is also part of that. If you get hit by a Hellpod, you should die. If your friend shoots you in the head, you should die from that. And we believe that when we create the world and focus on believability, those hilarious moments can happen. I don’t see these as contradictory in any way. Over the first year, we mostly fought against Terminids and Automatons, and some players felt like the Automatons were the tougher faction. Now, with a year of balance changes and the introduction of the Illuminate, how has that changed? Do players still abandon the robot front because they’d just rather fight bugs, or has that evened out over time? What you’re saying is true; there are definitely some players who play primarily against one faction. What I can say is that we do actually see from data that what players care about the most is the Major Orders and story development of the game. When there’s a story that focuses on the bot front, for instance, we see massive impacts of players fighting the bots. Our players want to feel like they’re part of the community and they’re fighting for the cause of Super Earth. It’s one of the biggest trends our game has, the immense power of role-playing the Galactic War. That’s what we’re expanding a lot. We expanded a little bit on it in 2024, and we have massive plans to expand even more going forward. If we have a Major Order to play against the bugs, we see way more than half of players playing against bugs, then we switch it around to bots or Illuminates or whatever it might be. I think it’s inevitable that players will have their own favorite faction, and if every faction had the exact same kind of experience, then we’re not expanding the game enough. We want to offer different experiences, challenges, and emotions with these factions. We want to expand on them in many different ways going forward. The Jet Brigade, for example — it’s an offshoot of the bot faction, a few units that behave a little bit differently that we can toggle on and off. They add a new flavor to the faction, and as we go into the future, with all factions, we want to add special units or modifications to the factions to push them in different directions, so even within the broader bots, bugs, or Illuminate factions, they would have their own different branches. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25309153/helldivers_2_screenshot_disclaimer_18_en_08sept23.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Over the last year, what did the team learn from the story beats that played out over Major Orders, like the black hole in Meridia, or the defeat — and sudden return, with Factory Striders — of the Automatons? I’ll try to cram everything into this answer that I want, because it’s something I’m super passionate about. From the get-go — with the Galactic War and the game master and how we build the game in general with a systemic approach — we wanted to emulate a tabletop role-playing kind of experience. There’s a bunch of ways the story that you’re playing can turn out, and there’s randomness factored in alongside the choices of the people you’re playing with. That sort of emergent storytelling is something we think is super fun, and it’s what we want to do with the war and the game master. When we first launched the game, I thought, OK, we have a version 1.0 here, but we’re imagining a 3.0 or 5.0 that’ll be super epic. I didn’t anticipate how powerful it already was. When we had Malevelon Creek moments, or Meridia, or whatever — people were role-playing and we had players super invested in the story. It was such a beautiful thing to see, and it blew us away. Then we had to talk about what players can expect going forward. We’re building this system to be more interesting in many different ways. One of the main ways we’re expanding on the Galactic War is the game master, like the game master in a tabletop role-playing game — the people who have tools at their disposal like control events, functionality, specific enemies, specific missions, modifications to the game rules, and so forth. The second track is community-controlled functionality events, like the [Democratic Space Station]. That was a shaky launch, but it’s at least one of the steps, and we’re planning to improve on the DSS and keep building on the functionality. It’s one of the ways we want to give a chess piece to the community, and we have several more planned as well. We want to give the community ways to have a real impact on the outcomes of the Galactic War and leave permanent marks. They’d be able to change the game meta in considerable, noticeable ways, just like people in a tabletop role-playing game. The third factor we’re investing a lot of time into is random events. If you’re playing a tabletop role-playing game, you have a die, you throw the die, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. Everything might go very well; everything might go south quickly. These random events are super important, and we want to create these events to be things that we can’t even control and the community can’t control. I believe having this randomness factored in can create really intense moments. It’s already created intense moments for us because to begin with, we didn’t have these random events in place, and our community surprised us with what they were able to do. Our game master had to really scramble to keep up and was spending very long hours doing so, which wasn’t great, and we’ve since improved that. So it shouldn’t make anyone work overtime, but at least we are building into these random events — super storms on planets, galactic catastrophic events, and so forth. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/12/canva-10.png?quality=90&strip=all] The Illuminates are the newest faction, but their roster is much smaller than the other two factions. Can we expect new Illuminate units to hit the battlefield in the coming months? I’m going to be a little bit cryptic. One thing that I’ve struggled with, personally, is that we can’t do a roadmap in a traditional way for our game. We don’t want to spoil anything, but we know what the Illuminates’ high-level purpose and goals are. With the introduction in conjunction with The Game Awards, what we wanted to focus on more than anything was an alien invasion kind of fantasy. It’s no surprise that we’re super inspired by movies, and it’s known that the main inspiration for bugs is Starship Troopers and bots are the Terminator movies. We want you to feel like you’re part of these movies; we consider our game to be something like a systemic, emergent action movie simulator, or something like that. So when we started the Illuminate, the question was: What sort of movie do we want to emulate? We landed on getting to live through an alien invasion fantasy and then a zombie horde experience, and we combined those two. The Illuminate are more advanced than they might seem, and they have a long history in the Helldivers universe. There’ll be a lot more coming with the Illuminate, and their intentions will become gradually more clear as the story progresses. The Illuminates arrived alongside urban maps, and it’s a great change of pace to fight through city streets as opposed to wilderness or rocky maps. Are there plans to bring urban maps to Automaton and Terminid maps as well? One of the most important things when heading into the live-service environment was to make the universe more believable. So Helldivers have ventured out into space, they’re colonizing planets, they have these expansionist ambitions. But the question you’d ask yourself playing at launch is, Where is everybody? There were a few outposts, small buildings, SEAF soldiers. But it didn’t feel like the planet was inhabited, and that was never the intention. The Helldivers are expanding in all directions, into bug and Automaton territories. It makes total sense there should be settlements there. So, all I can say is: Keep playing and you’ll find out.