The passion of liberty burns hot and cold.
There is a saying, somewhat applicable to our current circumstances, that is spoken only as a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Helldivers 2 is a triumph by most metrics, but it also happens to be the perfect distillation of that sentiment: “May you develop an interesting game.” Looking back over 2024, I wouldn’t wish such a curse on my worst enemy.
To call Helldivers 2’s first year ‘hectic’ is like saying that a tidal wave got you ‘damp’. I’ve been combing over our past year of coverage to write this article, and let me tell you, it’s a rollercoaster. Its players have loved it like a carnival ride, showing up en-masse to create the first stomach-dropping plunge, followed by a series of sharp spikes and helix turns. It’s enough to make a gamer woozy.
It’s perhaps fitting that, as a game, Helldivers 2 had a troubled start even before it hit Steam. This thing was in development for almost eight entire years, with former CEO (current CCO) Johan Pilestedt citing both the studio’s rapid growth and a set of moving targets as the main factor. In his own words, “We had this mentality from being in a small studio where we basically said yes to any challenge because we knew that we could do it. But the problem is that, suddenly, when you can’t do it anymore, that starts biting you in the ass.”
I’m struggling to draw any conclusion, other than the fact—and I say this with complete sympathy—that Arrowhead Games is just a studio that will never get to know peace. Pilestedt must have upset a witch or something, and now a pox has been placed upon the studio to get knocked down, then get back up again every other month.
An Arrowhead shot into the deep end
I don’t think anyone, least of all Arrowhead, anticipated that Helldivers 2 would be as popular as it was in those first few months. As someone there at the beginning, I can say it was absolute mayhem. Arrowhead hit the ground running in “crisis mode” (their exact words) to deal with a horde of hundreds of thousands of players showing up to shoot bugs and bots, across Steam and PlayStation.
Captain Pilestedt of the good ship Arrowhead would later describe the atmosphere as a “war room”, adding that when “we were looking at performance [it] became clear that like: ‘this is actually going to be a big problem in a couple of hours.'” It’s a hilarious image—one half of the studio having a launch party, the other half realising they wouldn’t get to sit down for a while. Or, as it turns out, basically all of 2024.
Those servers, dear reader, were screaming for mercy. Those defcon one player counts doubled the weekend after, causing server crashes to the point where some players were staying logged in overnight just to avoid the dice roll that was trying to get in. The player count itself had to be capped at 450,000, while Sony was forced to send in extra engineers like a king delegating troops to its ally’s warfront, which allowed them to bump that cap up to 700,000 as infrastructure was put in place. Even then, things wouldn’t be relatively stable until around February 26—roughly 18 entire days after the game first launched.
I can’t imagine the kind of haul that took place at Arrowhead HQ over those opening weeks, I can only hope that anyone got any sleep at all.
March-April: You and me could write a bad balance
So. Arrowhead had a hit on its hands; a rip-roaring success, millions of copies to be sold over the following months. It was thrust into the spotlight, and pre-emptively crowned king of games for all of 2024—issue is, crowns are bloody heavy, and no-one figured that out as quickly as Arrowhead did.
Its first major balance patch, which arrived March 6, did not land spectacularly well. To summarise, a set of weapons and stratagems were turned to rubbish—the anti-tank Railgun, a beloved child of the playerbase, was slammed particularly hard. Its nerf blew a hole in the balance of the game, with the populace quickly realising that their silly horde shooter was full of annoying tank enemies they lacked the tools to tackle.
Meanwhile, Arrowhead was struggling to handle its suddenly massive community and, to a certain extent, its own employees. While I do not envy the job of responding to hundreds of thousands of loud, very upset gamers, writing “watching u all cry amuses me so much” probably isn’t the best way to calm things down. This was followed by a promise by Arrowhead to keep things copasetic and to “educate our developers” going forward.
Mind, it’s not like all of them were being that unreasonable—I’m certain we were seeing developers boiling over rather than lashing out. While the comments from devs were being immortalised, reposted, and shared, the context was absent. The onus is, perhaps unfairly, on official representatives of a company to keep their chill—but we’re all only human, and there was a lot of out-of-order behaviour on the part of the playerbase, too.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. Arrowhead began its banter as it meant to continue, with the introduction of mechs and flying terminids, casually dropped into the game while no-one was looking and denied by Pilestedt with a twinkle in his eye. Flying bugs, however, were accompanied by other technical bugs. For example, arc weapons started to crash games mere days after an entire Warbond centered around arc equipment dropped. Oof.
The major spectre looming over the game, though, really was the armour thing. Certain enemies were just too hard to kill, and cropped up too damn often. There were patches that addressed this, but over the months, the meme of “just use stratagems” began to spread, due to dev comments in March telling players to rely on stratagems rather than their actual guns.
As March turned into April, bugs—not the Terminids, but the aforementioned game glitches—began to grate at players, who had previously assumed they’d be fixed in short order. Misaligned scopes, the Sickle being stopped by bushes, the Spear being borderline useless, and bouts of crashes. The devs even talked about it—arguing that Arrowhead only had “so much time in a work week”.
It’s about this time that Galactic War fatigue started to settle in, too. Recruits were beginning to glimpse the man behind the curtain, especially when the Menkent Line happened. Players worked hard to, in-universe, help engineers establish orbital defences on a set of planets. Not soon after, however, those planets were being invaded—despite the efforts of the masses.
Combine that disappointment with another patch in April that continued to nerf some fan favourites, like the Quasar cannon, and players were left feeling like they were playing a game that introduced more bugs than it fixed with each update, while seeing all of their favourite toys ruined. Then, uh, all of May happened.
May: Sony repeatedly steps on rakes for an entire month
After gathering together all of these snazzy little links for this article, I am 100% happy to call May Arrowhead’s dark midnight of the soul.
It all started with Sony, who decreed that all Helldivers 2 players would have to link their accounts to PSN, the publisher’s online network. Sony argued that the PSN-free months leading up to this point had been a “grace period”, permitted due to the game’s rampant server issues.
Problem being, among the general (and understandable, honestly) distaste for having to make a new account for a thing they didn’t want to use, players realised that PSN only serves a select number of countries. Meaning that players who’d been shooting bugs and bots for Super Earth just fine were suddenly getting the rug swept out from under them.
Over 200,000 negative reviews poured in, a spike that shot Helldivers 2 firmly into “mixed” user review territory. It was such a sudden and dramatic response that a developer who’d encouraged unhappy players to make their anger known in reviews, or refund the game, was seemingly fired for it. To quote Pilestedt at the time: “Ouch, right in the review score.”
Sony eventually backed down, although the game remains delisted for sale in non-PSN countries to this day.
It doesn’t help that, while all of this was happening, the aforementioned problems with miserly balance patches and bugs were ongoing—including a weird change to patrol spawns that left them utterly borked for a while. Pilestedt even spoke up about it, saying he felt the patches had “gone too far”. To quote him: “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.” Then Polar Patriots, a Warbond barely anyone liked (no, really, they did a survey) dropped, seeming like a low-point for Arrowhead’s promised live service design.
This all weighed pretty heavily on Arrowhead’s developers. In the words of former community manager Twinbeard at the time: “I think the biggest issue so far has been that we were overwhelmed”, referring to both the game’s launch mayhem and the PSN controversies. “It takes time—a lot of time—to bounce back and get ahead with such massive pressure, and what can easily be perceived as us being slow or not listening is more (IMHO anyway) the fact that we’re still not up to speed.”
By the end of the month, Arrowhead had recognised it needed a change. Pilestedt stepped down as CEO to focus on the creative and design aspect of the game as CCO, while Paradox veteran Shams Jorjani arrived to fill his shoes.
June: We’re so back
June seemed like a month of hope for Arrowhead—the studio fully admitted it needed to hold its goddamn horses, and a massive patch in the middle of the month, featuring a lot of weapon buffs and bug fixes, felt like the start of something new. That’s not to say there weren’t issues, mind—the Spear, in addition to a long-standing tradition of never hitting what it’s actually aimed at, also began to crash games. And just like this section of the article, these peacetimes were short-lived.
July-August: It’s so over
Escalation of Freedom, on paper, seemed like a winner—new enemies and objectives, more weapons, votekicking, and a swampy biome to provide a new kind of hellscape to romp around in. It should’ve gone down well like a nice cup of liber-tea, given what was promised. Unfortunately, it, uh, did not do that.
While the content updates to the game were solid, the balance updates were not. For starters, the Flamethrower, which had been becoming a fan favourite, got completely mangled. The patch note, “adjusted flame effects to work more realistically,” actually belied a complete retooling of how the weapon felt to fire—and a nerf besides. Remember what Pilestedt said about the fun being removed? Yeah.
I don’t want to necessarily paint this update as a disaster, because even through all of this turmoil, Helldivers 2 still held relatively healthy numbers for a live service co-op game—only dipping to around 10,000-20,000 players at a low murmur on Steam. No Fortnite, but busy enough that you could go in and find a game basically whenever you wanted.
Still, the dents to the Flamethrower represented something far more severe—a fracture in the playerbase’s trust. Divers were promised an end to random nerfs, and that Pilestedt would be more in-touch with the game’s development. And yet, when it came down to it, the same balancing patterns were re-emerging.
That’s not to say they had actually been lied to, or anything. The thing about game development is that it takes a while—as Twinbeard stated in May, the whole of Arrowhead had been playing catch-up. It’s entirely possible that the patches pushed in July had been organised in a pre-realisation environment, and simply not pulled in time.
New CEO Jorjani, to his credit, handled this test of leadership admirably. “I’d take this ANY day of the week over nobody giving a s**t” and “Me just talking about it isn’t enough, actions matter” are some refreshingly transparent responses to player woes.
In came Arrowhead’s “60-day plan”, an ambitious PR move that gave angry players a timeline and a laundry list of promises. This should, under any reasonable circumstances, have led to some form of disaster; two months is not a lot of time when it comes to development, and Helldivers 2 had a lot of rebalancing to do. Then they only went and pulled it off.
September-December: We’re SO back!
The 60-day restoration project released its first part mid-September, and boy howdy was it a doozy. Not only were those heinous Flamethrower changes reversed, but Arrowhead finally started to ease the clamps when it came to their heavily-armoured enemies. Old favourites like the Railgun were buffed, while specialised anti-tank weapons like the Recoilless Rifle had their effectiveness boosted through the roof to keep them relevant. There was a laundry list of primary weapon buffs, too, heralding an end to the “just use your stratagems” era.
It went down smooth, causing a spike in users that hadn’t been seen since before the Escalation of Freedom days. These kinds of player bumps are a rarity for balance patches, but it felt like people were dang curious to see whether Arrowhead was making good on its promises.
Fast forward to mid-October, and the 60-day patch plan was complete. More reductions to enemy armour and more buffs to weapons, as well as a refresh of secondary systems like enemy patrol patterns, put the finishing touches on a transformation of design intent. Gone were the days of needing a hyper-specific loadout to avoid punishment at the hands of Big Joel; now you could muck around with the game’s ever-expanding arsenal of weaponry without feeling like you were screwing yourself.
The game was, finally, after all its ups-and-downs, free to focus on content—and it’s been delivering on that, too. The Democratic Space Station came along in November, and while it didn’t have the easiest entry, its existence allows players a more direct handle on the Galactic War, for good or for ill. Then there’s Omens of Tyranny, a patch that dropped outta nowhere during The Game Awards, finally working in the long-absent Illuminate faction and putting a glorious capstone on the whole thing.
It’s a fitting bow to a chaotic year that has ended with a reclamation of Helldivers 2’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” recent review score, after the catastrophic review bombs of May. It’s even more fitting that… look, to break the movie magic for a sec, I had this entire thing drafted, edited, and ready to go on December 18. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be eating Christmas leftovers with my family. But before the week even had a chance to end, I had to add this paragraph because, just under the wire, Arrowhead had to sneak in one more controversy with its Killzone Crossover. Don’t worry, it got better. The rollercoaster continues, and it’s been fascinating to follow along.
So often, live service lifetimes are either runaway successes (your Fortnites and your Marvel Rivals) or tragic flops (your Concords and your Suicide Squads). But Helldivers 2 sits somewhere squarely in the middle of that.
It’s a game whose popularity ambushed even its developers, whose community—loud, passionate, and occasionally out of line—both hate it and love it in equal measure. Its first year has been a story of catastrophe and redemption. But now, at the end of the year, it feels like liberty has finally found its home. I just hope Arrowhead’s developers have managed to rest, because by Democracy, they deserve it.
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