Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers 2 is designed after tabletop games with players able to win or lose major story moments depending on the performance of players.
Right now, players are getting ready to fight the Cyborg Legion as Super Earth fights to invade New Cyberstan in the game’s Machinery of Oppression update, but it’s not known how the story will end.
In an interview with IGN, game director Mikael Eriksson explained that “the outcome is now predetermined, so we don’t know what will happen” when players fight against the Automatons and the returning Cyborgs” starting tomorrow.
Eriksson explained that the Battle for Cyberstan “will be the most ambitious one yet” with new design decisions that will make it “much more clear for players what the consequences would be depending on how they choose to tackle this”. While previous campaigns have had consequences, Arrowhead is planning to make even deeper choices and repercussions for player failure.
“What we are trying to do is we’re trying to go as deep as we can, and deeper with every update.”
Helldivers 2 Game Director Mikael Erikkson
“Players can win and players can lose, and it’s going to be super fun to see that play out. Last time, with the Battle for Super Earth, which I think was maybe the biggest one before this, we also didn’t know,” Eriksson said. “Eventually players actually managed to defend Super Earth, which was super cool to see. Following that was pure fun for everyone at the office except for maybe the Game Master who was sweating a little bit, but for everyone else it was fun to see.”
Eriksson explained that the team at Arrowhead “do want things to be consequential” with the story playing out in a way that’s “up to the players to determine”. They continued: “We know that players will now go to Cyberstan, but we don’t know how it will play out. We don’t know if they will win. We don’t know if they will lose. And there will be impacts on the Galactic War level. So the story that is being written in the Galactic War will change depending on what they do. And it can be quite consequential.”
In the past, entire planets have been wiped from the map, and that could happen at any time. Beating the Cyborgs may cause the new enemies to go back into hiding; taking over New Cyberstan could permanently alter how we interact with the forces for the rest of time. While past changes have been rather small, Arrowhead wants to make events must more consequential.
“What we are trying to do is we’re trying to go as deep as we can, and deeper with every update, into this kind of experience where it really feels impactful on the meta layer, where you can see afterwards on the Galactic War screen,” he continued. “You can see it only looks like this because of all the actions that we took. But then there’s of course additional things that we’re talking about, which is impactful and persistent gameplay changes as well.
Eriksson says that it’s not just about story changes, but also tying into “rewards and actual gameplay differences. Losing could force players to have access to much weaker stratagems or less reinforcements per mission; Helldivers could be forced back to basic, level one weapons for a time—there are limitless possibilities on what losing this fight could mean.
Right now, the Battle for Cyberstan is the most daunting challenge Helldivers 2 has ever seen, even more so than the fight for Super Earth last year. While losing Super Earth was possible, the entire fanbase banded together to protect the jewel of the galaxy, but will the galaxy’s heroes be able to beat the Automatons? Of course we will!
