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It’s been a little bit of time since Helldivers 2 players have heard much from former Arrowhead CEO and still very much chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt, with the developer seemigly having enjoyed some very well-earned time off. Now, however, he’s made a bit of a return in rather grand fashion, by answering Discord questions from everyone and their mum.
Naturally, the flak the studio has faced from players following the deployment of the most recent batch of weapon balancing changes – the one Arrowhead announced that much-discussed 60-day plan of changes that it’s already acting upon in reponse to – came up, as it has in 99% of dev chats about the game over the last little while.
“It’s hard. It’s a tricky situation. The criticism is valid, but it causes low morale, and low morale causes slow development speed. Talk about negative spiral,” Pilestedt said in response to a player asking how the game’s developers are currently feeling. “I think it’s important for us to reiterate to the team that criticism happens because people care, ” he added in a separate response, “The worst thing would have been if we fucked up and oo one cared.”
He also offered his take on a while range of other topics. For example, that change to fire that everyone hated because they believe it made flamethrowers un-fun – Pilestedt “read about it on Facebook when at a family dinner during vacation” and reasoned: “I understand what it aimed to do, but it was not iterated upon enough and the vfx looks like [Team Fortress 1].”
On the subject of the test servers that players have been asking for, the developer said over the course of mutiple comments: “We will have an experimental server at some point. It’s being worked on. It will be a restricted group of active users, and some sort NDA attached – we don’t want spoilers for those that aren’t testing.”
He also revealed that Arrowhead “once had a backpack that was a robot arm that stimmed anyone nearby” in the works, adding: “I think we need more support Stratagems in general for those that want to play to help the team.” Plus, that review bomb cape, Pilestedt said the studio is waiting for more clarity on the issue of the game being locked out of certain regions by the PSN sign-in requirement before it deploys that.
Oh, and in csse you were wondering, Pilerstedt’s preffered name for the Termind larva you have to carry in those babysitting missions is “Larvis”, which I assume is the bug version of the name Mavis, maybe. There was plenty of other stuff discussed during the QnA, so it’s woth heading to Helldivers 2’s Discord server and search up the name Pilestedt if you’re curious.
How do you feel about all the Helldivers 2 info the CCO dropped here? Let us know below!