With the calendar stretching out to 2025, the studio behind one of last year’s biggest games certainly doesn’t look like it plans to rest on its laurels. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead’s long-time CCO and figurehead Johan Pilestedt has apparently suggested that the long-term plan could well end up being this second game “becoming” its successor through updates.
Yes, while many people have spent their holidays fighting The Illuminate, after Arrowhead almost managed to stop that price reaction against the game‘s Killzone crossover team, Pilestedt has been chatting with some of them on social media about what’s in store for them the future.
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In a Twitter thread just before Christmas, the developer responded to someone asking about the possibility of Helldivers 2 being updated to allow eight-player co-op at some point. The answer, at least for now, was no, with Pilestedt saying that “the game‘s engine, network architecture, user interface, performance and difficulty cannot cope” with eight players at once right now. .
He added that while it would require a “significant investment,” this sort of thing “is not impossible, and it’s something we talk about often in the studio.” However, the following might be the most interesting part of the answer.
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Although in response to a joke that Helldivers 3 will be released in 2032 with that eight-player limit and swimming, Pilestedt said: “We’re turning Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3… so you might be right. Except maybe the swimming, I don’t.” “I don’t think it’s possible to swim on a heavy aircraft carrier with rifle and support weapons.”
Naturally, this has sparked a lot of chatter on the game‘s subreddit. There’s a lot of support for it, at least in theory, given that the game has been out for less than a year and people are eager for Arrowhead to continue focusing on creating meaningful updates for the foreseeable future.
Some have concerns, however, with user pokiane writing: “You have to wonder how limiting your old engine will be. I’m all for just adding things to the game rather than making a third one, but it would be a shame if we lost some great features.” new ones (more than 4 players, giant maps, more variety of enemies, etc.) for that reason.
While he let people debate that amongst themselves, Pilestedt stayed busy chatting about something else that could be coming to Helldivers 2 in the future: full-size miniguns. “There are things we want to do before that,” he wrote in response to a Reddit user who posted a video of a guy shooting what appears to be a Nerf minigun. “Miniguns as a portable weapon are notoriously problematic, you can see this in every video of people firing a machine gun from the hip, the crazy recoil throws them more or less backwards.
“The way we would solve this is to move players back unless they adopt a stable shooting position. This would probably also apply to the HMG (which was added perhaps a little prematurely). Also, the backpack charger is needed And unfortunately, the game does not currently support a weapon that takes up 2 slots, which will have to be resolved before a minigun can be added. After all that is done, the 5.5mm minigun will be ready to be deployed.
He ended by asking if people have “any other design suggestions on how to make a minigun in Helldivers”, so be sure to tell him if you do; It seems like someone has already floated the idea of having the weapon work with stamina drain. go back in your head.
