Helldivers 2 creative boss agrees the game has gotten less about 'a fun, chaotic, challenging, emergent experience' and too much about 'challenge and competitiveness'

Helldivers 2's creative director acknowledges the game's shift towards competitiveness, impacting its original fun, chaotic, and emergent gameplay experience, and is working to address player feedback and improve the game's balance.

Helldivers 2's creative director has responded to players, agreeing that the shooter has unfortunately become less about "a fun, chaotic, challenging, emergent experience" and more about "competitiveness." 

Just recently, a Helldivers 2 subreddit post showed what appeared to be Automaton lasers being slowed down by bushes. Yes, you read that right – the local fauna can actually slow down laser beams while they're in mid-air. Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt responded to the video in a lengthy message, thanking the player for their feedback.

"I 100% agree with tech debt – it is a constant challenge for the engineers, where we have to choose between working on long-standing issues or new features, which is where we fail to deliver new content at the appropriate quality," Pilestedt added in the message. The director also wrote that Arrowhead's team is "tired from a long development" that's been challenging for everyone.

Pilestedt also explains that, with the "systematic approach to game design," it now takes longer to onboard new engineers at Arrowhead, what with roughly 200 systems that need to constantly interact with one another in-game. "Mistakes happen as some who wrote the original systems are no longer with the studio, meaning nuances can bite us in the behind," the director writes.

"We are improving this, but as you can see – this combined with the demands on the team from the appreciation that the game has found as well as our ambition level is straining us," Pilestedt explains, adding that Arrowhead "needs to do better" with its quality assurance process. 

"The key issue that I see is the delta from launch where the game was about having a fun, chaotic, challenging emergent experience with like-minded [players] has been eroded through a shift in focus to challenge and competitiveness without considering the more playful experience," Helldivers 2's creative director writes, before thanking the player again for their feedback.

It's fair to say Arrowhead's game is going through a rough patch right now. Players were extremely critical of a patch earlier this month that nerfed fire-based weapons, and comments from Arrowhead's CEO didn't help matters. Pilestedt also recently admitted that criticism of Helldivers 2 was perfectly valid, which has a lot to do with Arrowhead now actively developing test servers for Helldivers 2 for new features. 

Check out our guide to the best Helldivers 2 weapons after the huge Escalation of Freedom update.