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Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have been voluble lately about potentially adding elements from other sci-fi worlds to the shooter, with chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt rubbing his hands gleefully at the prospect of partnerships with Warhammer, Alien, the Fifth Element, and more besides. Speaking at the G-STAR Conference in Busan earlier this month, recently appointed chief executive officer Shams Jorjani confirmed that Arrowhead are looking into such collaborations, giving the example of refitting your dropship to look like one of Halo’s Pelicans, or introducing the Zerg from Blizzard’s Starcraft as an enemy faction.
Jorjani cautioned listeners, however, that these injections of third-party DNA need to look and feel appropriate to the setting. After all, if you start fecklessly chucking the Zerg, Chaos Space Marines or Fifth Element’s, er, flying taxis into Helldivers 2, it might spoil the meticulous coherency of a game in which saluting protects you against lethal falls and some guy called Joel is running the universe. The funny part is that according to Jorjani, Arrowhead once envisaged a system that would get round the problem of inconsistency by essentially making third-party cosmetics, including whole map skins, visible only to players who have them enabled. To put that another way, Arrowhead once envisaged a system in which individual Helldivers would hallucinate other licenses.
I feel a little guilty about writing this up, because it’s based on an automatic Google translation of an article in Korean, and automatic translations aren’t always reliable. But also, it’s fun. Find the relevant extract from Jorjani’s answer below. I would focus on the spirit of the statements rather than the specific wording.
We’ve discussed a cosmetic system in the past where only what the gamer sees changes. For example, in the case of ‘Dota 2′, when applying a map skin, the user’s map will appear to have changed, but others will see it as the default map. However, this was rejected because it could cause confusion during the game. The terrain or object that one person is talking about may appear different to another person. In any case, even if there is a crossover, it seems that most of it will be applied to armor or weapons. As long as it does not interfere with the gamers’ gaming experience.
Games have done things like this before, but I’m struggling to think of one that renders the entire map differently for every player with the associated DLC installed. I, personally, think that having certain players effectively occupy parallel realities would be both brilliant and entirely in keeping with Helldivers 2’s parody of brainless kamikaze heroism.
You could portray it as an injection of experimental combat amphetamines. Imagine landing on Malevelon Creek and trying to coordinate a base assault when half of your squad think they’re in Disneyland. You ask your sniper to cover you but unfortunately, she’s got the 101 Dalmations DLC installed and perceives the Tyranids as puppies. You call in the dropship and she runs away screaming about the disembodied head of Glenn Close. What I’m basically saying is: make it a bit like this cinematic of the Pyro in Team Fortress 2.
There’s a fair bit more from both Jorjani and Pilestedt in the full G-STAR Conference piece, including reflections on the ever-incendiary question of weapon balancing, recent additions like the Democracy Space Station, and how they’ve adapted their production process since Helldivers 2’s release. They also cheerfully refused to talk about the Illuminate, those wily devils.