Helldivers 2 CCO Johan Pilestedt says the industry’s got it backwards by putting features over fundamentals: ‘We talk way too little about the core philosophy’

Helldivers 2’s runaway popularity last year was, in part, due to just how focused it felt—while other games might bombard you from orbit with a silo of microtransactions, features, menus, and stats, Helldivers 2 basically said, “Hey, do you like shooting bugs? You wanna scrap some robots? Here’s a bunch of guns to do just that. Here’s a game that’s very good at it. Go hog wild.”

That’s not to say it doesn’t have secondary systems, mind. There’s still an unlock system and microtransactional Warbonds for $10 a pop (or a dozen plus hours grinding currency) but it is, overall, a videogame that knows what it’s about. Johan Pilestedt, CCO of Arrowhead Games—and formerly its CEO, before stepping down so he could get his mitts more on the creative process—had some similar thoughts at GDC, during a talk about the game’s success.

“When I talk to people that are in the business side of things,” Pilestedt explains, “[they say] it’s the price point, it’s the galactic war … it’s the release timing that’s also the success.” He thinks this focus on any one individual point, however, is a load of old codswallop: “If you think that just transplanting one of these things into your game will make it a smash hit? I think that’s wrong”.

He breaks it down into three steps: Fundamentals, style, and features. For Pilestedt, fundamentals are the real brass tacks. Things like the values of your studio, “the fantasies you create”, your target audience, and how the game feels at a baseline level.

Style is how you direct that raw material into a cohesive experience. Only then can you start pulling features—like the Galactic War—out of those two things: “Those two inform the features of the game.”

The place where a lot of studios go wrong, he says, is focusing so hard on features before anything else. “We talk way too little about the core philosophy of each studio’s reason for making games, and how it affects the end product that you put out there … [fundamentals are] the base from which all other decisions derive. It is what lies at the heart of the studio’s mentality, it’s the core of what the studio thinks about other games as well.”

It all sounds a bit esoteric, which is why Pilestedt starts talking about cars, because everyone gets car metaphors: “Here’s a task for all of you in the room. Imagine the best car,” fielding a few requirements for a solid ride from the audience.

“If we try to create a car that’s suitable for all of these really wide and varying perspectives, you’re going to get something that’s strange.” To illustrate, Pilestedt “wrangled AI to generate the best car”, and it produced a monstrosity that set the whole crowd laughing.

“A car that’s made for everyone is a car that’s made for no one … The games industry is now so vast that everybody can find a game that suits their needs and enjoy them. But we shouldn’t cannibalize our own audiences to try to get somebody else’s audience. That would be like Porsche making a SUV.”

Pilestedt’s stabbing at some high concept stuff, here—but he’s not wrong. Back when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leauge dropped its first proper trailer, PC Gamer’s own Robin Valentine made the astute observation that superheroes and live service don’t really combine well.

Now, obviously, Marvel Rivals proved that headline wrong at face value—but Robin was specifically referring to “the Destiny model” of live service, “a slow treadmill of progress based around incrementally better weapons and accessories” which, you might note, is absent from Rivals. And I agree whole-heartedly with him.

Giving Harley Quinn a bat that does +2% damage to shield enemies or whatever doesn’t grok with the idea of playing superheroes at all—as Pilestedt warns against, it was an act of hubris, taking a feature from one game and stuffing it into another just because it was proven to work for Destiny, not because it fit the core fundamentals of the property, or Rocksteady’s prior bailiwick—that is, making solid third-person action games.

Fundamentals, not features is one of those esoteric pieces of wisdom that makes sense the more you think about it. And it’s just good life advice, in general. Don’t just imitate what works well, figure out what you want to do, then imitate the things that do that thing and put your own saucy little spin on them.

Heck, Helldivers 2 did it—if you pop the hood open and look at its guts, it’s a lovely blend of the arcade chaos of games like Star Wars: Battlefront, mixed with the squad shooter tactics of something like Arma, all wrapped up in an arcadey and accessible package. Add a little bit of Arrowhead’s experience with Magika’s friendly fire and ragdolling chaos, and you’ve got a winner—but, as Pilestedt says, it’s all in service to the fundamental core.