Helldivers 2 was also originally designed to have a completely different armour system than what we ultimately got to see in the game.
While celebrating the first anniversary of Helldivers 2, developer Arrowhead Game Studios revealed during a livestream that the studio left quite a few ideas for the game on the cutting room floor during development. Among these ideas were one for five-player squads.
“Helldivers 2 was originally designed for five people, actually,” said head of product testing Patrik Lasota when answering questions from fans. “That was Johann’s call because he had thoughts around ‘when you’re four people playing and a fifth joins you, suddenly you’re a three-stack and a two-stack, and it creates this imbalance. But if it’s five people and someone joins then you’re two three-stacks, and with three groups instead one becoming a pair.’”
“So we actually wanted Helldivers 2 to be five people originally,” he continued. “But unfortunately, as we played with it, it just didn’t work. It turned out that when you’re five people, someone is always just standing around, not really participating in the action. It also gave you a whole lot of flexibility in your team’s stratagem loadout. So it just turned the game into… you really didn’t have to make any choices when it came to stratagems. But I say the biggest thing was that someone was always just standing around and idling instead of participating in the game, which prompted us to remove it a few years in [development].”
Lasota also revealed that there were several other ideas that got cut from Helldivers 2 before its release. For example, the studio had been working on ideas surrounding planets having lower gravity, which would have made players being able to jump higher, and for longer as they floated down. This was ultimately cancelled because it added a lot of extra work for animators.
There was also going to be an armour system that worked differently from what we ultimately got in Helldivers 2. Unfortunately, Lasota didn’t reveal too many details about how it would have been different from the game’s current armour system. He just mentioned that it “didn’t play well”, and was ultimately shelved.
Since Helldivers 2 has been an immense success for Arrowhead Game Studios and Sony, the studio has been seemingly working on a new collaboration event. On its own Discord channel, a developer using the handle Sephez said that the studio was in “the very early stages of something new.”
The last major collaboration event we got to see in Helldivers 2 was one with Guerrilla Games’ Killzone franchise – specifically Killzone 2. As part of the crossover event, Helldivers 2 players got to earn new armour sets, weapons, and banners and capes.
As part of celebrating Helldivers 2‘s first year, Arrowhead Game Studios has been releasing videos about some of the most notable player-driven events in the game’s Galactic War meta-story. Kicking things off back in February, the studio released a video that featured Game Master J.O.E.L. talking about the epic Defense of Mort, which was one of the first major story beats in the Galactic War.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5.
