Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has addressed significant concern within the game’s community, teasing new upcoming content amid ‘mostly negative’ Steam reviews.
Recent user reviews for the third-person action game plunged to ‘mostly negative’ in response to dissatisfaction with recent updates and a perceived lack of content. Responding to “the community’s burning questions,” Arrowhead published an in-universe transmission acknowledging the backlash.
“Helldivers 2 matters to all of us, and we want to be clearer about what we’re working on and what’s coming next,” Arrowhead began.
New content is coming soon, the studio insisted, alongside improvements to the core of the game. Stability, progression, and the Galactic War were all mentioned as being in-line for work. The focus right now is on improving meta-progression and the Galactic War, Arrowhead said. “We’ve significantly expanded the team working in this area, reflecting how important these long-term systems are for the overall player experience,” the studio continued.
Upcoming Galactic War improvements include more meaningful rewards and community progression systems, evolving Major Orders into longer, multi-week themed “Campaigns,” and branching outcomes that “create clearer stakes and consequences based on player actions.” We’ll see the first results of this this summer.
Arrowhead also addressed concern about hidden changes in updates, promising to make patch notes “more accurately reflect gameplay adjustments.” It’ll also better explain balance changes. Arrowhead promised to talk about tech and performance improvements soon.
Here’s a big one: why did Arrowhead put exosuits in the premium Exo Experts warbond? (This sparked significant community backlash.) “The goal with the Exo Experts warbond was to create something that felt thematically strong and exciting, with exosuits as a core part of that fantasy,” Arrowhead explained. “That said, we’ve seen the feedback around how that landed — especially when it comes to expectations around how players unlock major gameplay items like exosuits. More broadly, we want to strike the right balance between what’s included in Warbonds and what’s available through gameplay, so that rewards feel both exciting and fair. And to be clear — yes, you will be getting other vehicles through gameplay in the future.”
And here’s perhaps the biggest one: Arrowhead said it has teams actively working on both new red stratagems, evolving ships, and player progression to level 150… “and beyond.”
“Our goal is to expand these areas in ways that add meaningful new options and support different playstyles, rather than just adding more for the sake of it,” Arrowhead teased.
That last note is sure to please disgruntled Helldivers 2 players, but there remains a degree of scepticism around Arrowhead’s ability to deliver here.
Helldivers 2 is now over two years old, and while it enjoyed a spectacularly successful launch, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios title of all time, it has had its ups and downs with fans as Arrowhead strives to maintain interest in the live service. Through it all, Helldivers 2 remains one of the most-played games on Steam (neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public), even though it is far from its launch heights.
There are bigger questions about Helldivers 2 and what Arrowhead can do with it, even as it works on a brand new game. Can Arrowhead make meaningful updates to Helldivers 2 beyond the sort of things we’ve seen in the last two years? In December, former Helldivers 2 chief Johan Pilestedt talked about the possibility of a Helldivers 2 rogue-lite mode. But can the developers expand the scope of the game to, say, increase the squad count? Increase the number of players in a squad? Release bigger maps?
As game director Mikael Eriksson told me in an interview in February, these sorts of game-changing updates are being worked on.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
