Within days, Helldivers 2 had more than 1 million people playing at once, and by May, it had earned the distinction of the fastest-selling PlayStation game of all time, outpacing God of War Ragnarok with 12 million units sold in 12 weeks. — Photos: Arrowhead Game Studios
As Arrowhead Studios was putting the finishing touches on its multiplayer sci-fi shooter Helldivers 2, Johan Pilestedt was firming up the game’s online infrastructure.
Pilestedt, then the developer’s CEO and now its chief creative officer, estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people would buy Helldivers 2 at launch, based on audiences for similar games in the genre. He decided to make sure the studio’s servers could handle up to 150,000 concurrent players, just in case.
But on Feb 8, the day Helldivers 2 was released for the PlayStation 5 and the PC, Arrowhead’s servers started crashing early.
A quarter-million people had tried to log on and play the game, more than double Pilestedt’s projections. The engineers got to work increasing what the servers could handle. Soon they had room for 400,000 players but blew through that almost immediately. They raised it to 500,000. Then 600,000.
Within days, Helldivers 2 had more than 1 million people playing at once, and by May, it had earned the distinction of the fastest-selling PlayStation game of all time, outpacing God of War Ragnarok with 12 million units sold in 12 weeks. The success was unexpected, even for those who made the game, a team-based shooter with similarities to Left 4 Dead and Destiny.
“I wouldn’t have thought that people would care this much in a million years,” Pilestedt said.
Unlike other live service games, which typically introduce predetermined content on a seasonal basis, updates in Helldivers 2 form the backbone of a constantly evolving story that changes and fluctuates, sometimes drastically, depending on how players act.
Although Helldivers 2, an intergalactic action-adventure with a setting and satirical tone reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic “Starship Troopers,” is technically a sequel, players were responding to what makes the game stand apart. Unlike other live service games, which typically introduce predetermined content on a seasonal basis, updates in Helldivers 2 form the backbone of a constantly evolving story that changes and fluctuates, sometimes drastically, depending on how players act.
“It felt cool and innovative,” said Paul Tassi, a video game journalist at Forbes who frequently writes about live service games. “It’s not structured like a traditional game.”
Pilestedt pointed to an extraordinary moment in the summer when players were forced to make a stark moral decision typical of the game’s mordant sense of humor: either take on a simple task to unlock a weapon or abandon it to save a children’s hospital from a siege by killer robots.
The developers, Pilestedt said, were pretty sure the players would go for the new weapon, a set of powerful anti-tank land mines capable of taking down larger enemies, which they had been wanting for months. But as the campaign waged on, it became clear that the community had decided to help the children. Once the hospital was saved, Arrowhead had to adjust its planned story to account for the choice.
In recent months, Arrowhead has been focused on addressing some common criticisms by tweaking weapon strength and retooling some of the core mechanics.
“The sense of morality was actually weighing higher for them than getting new stuff, which was something that we really didn’t foresee,” Pilestedt said.
Helldivers 2’s untraditional approach to the live service model was the plan from the start. As a child growing up in the 1980s, Pilestedt spent a lot of time playing Drakar och Demoner, Sweden’s take on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Arrowhead, Pilestedt said, hoped to channel the idea of “going to someone’s house to take part in an adventure that somebody has crafted for the rest of the group.” When it was time to approach the game’s live service component, the designers “started to think about that sort of crafted narrative, where gamers can influence the narrative with their actions, and there’s a game master having to react to tell the next part of the story.”
Helldivers 2 was written like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign: The studio sketched out a long-form choose-your-own adventure story, which it adjusts as the community completes (or fails) orders from the government of Super Earth, a self-proclaimed global democracy that is a thinly veiled authoritarian state.
The goal is to “liberate” planets in outer space, which in practice means stealing their resources and wiping out their native populations. Players work together to complete missions and work toward shared objectives, which are assigned weekly and require large-scale cooperation to finish before their time limits elapse.
Helldivers 2 has not maintained its sky-high player counts. Through November, the game’s concurrent online player count on Steam was fluctuating between 28,000 and 56,000. (Sony does not publicly release data about the number of concurrent players.)
Helldivers 2 was written like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign: The studio sketched out a long-form choose-your-own adventure story, which it adjusts as the community completes (or fails) orders from the government of Super Earth, a self-proclaimed global democracy that is a thinly veiled authoritarian state.
“It’s a pretty quick drop, more sharp than average,” Tassi said. “That long-term trend is something that would worry me a bit given that we don’t know what the game is adding in the future.”
In recent months, Arrowhead has been focused on addressing some common criticisms by tweaking weapon strength and retooling some of the core mechanics. The game’s first major expansion, Escalation of Freedom, made several tweaks to the game’s difficulty and balance that were received negatively by players when it was released in August, leading the studio to issue an apology.
Pilestedt said he believed that Escalation of Freedom was “a consequence of our success,” requiring more work than expected from a team already under considerable strain. “We fell short,” he said. In September, the team released a patch that served as a kind of course correction, walking back some of the earlier changes and making certain weapons more powerful to make the game easier and more fun.
The game has continued to engage players with its creative missions: Recent orders have included demands to fend off attacks on an interplanetary space station that is under construction; to “liberate” a mining colony from an army of killer robots; and, as a satirical request, to recruit slave labor for the cause of democracy from the refugees of war-torn planets. One of the game’s two major enemy factions, the Terminator-like Automatons, recently stole Helldiver jump pack technology, meaning that some of the droid platoons can now fly — an example of the ways that the game tries to keep players on their toes.
Pilestedt sees Helldivers 2 as a game that will evolve as the story continues to unfold and new secrets are revealed. Last week, Arrowhead surprised players with the game’s next expansion, called Omens of Tyranny, which introduces a third faction of enemies that use mind control to convert a planet’s civilian population into armies of zombies.
The novel approach to live service, according to Pilestedt, will have seismic consequences. “We have some really exciting updates coming,” he said, “and some rather big twists and turns for the core expectations of what the Helldivers universe even is.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
