Helldivers 2 boss outlines the single design trick that eventually led to his breakout success: "This works, I think we're gonna be rich someday"

Many years before Helldivers 2 became a global phenomenon, its director had to argue with his team to develop a design philosophy that he was convinced would make them rich.

Speaking at GDC, Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt explains that one of the “best moments I’ve ever had in video games” stemmed from an argument with CTO Anton Stenmark. While developing Magicka, the sorcery-based series that Arrowhead developed before Helldivers, Pilestedt says, “I told him ‘if I shoot a big rock at a foe and it doesn’t kill it, we need to do something with the rock, you can’t just make it disappear. Can we make it bounce into the air or something?’

Stenmark said that they could do that, but “‘it’s just a single physical projectile that’s gonna land somewhere, it’s never gonna hit anything’.” For Pilestedt, however, that was good enough: “‘But it might for one in 100 million, it’s fine.'” So Stenmark went away and implemented Magicka’s newest feature.

It would be two months before it paid off. Pilestedt explains how he watched Magicka’s play-testing manager prepare to fire a rock, throw it towards an enemy, and start “running away in panic. And would you believe it, the rock comes flying, lands on his head, cascade of blood – and I was like ‘this works. I think we’re gonna be rich someday.'” That moment, Pilestedt says, was “when I managed to convince the rest of the studio that this ‘it could happen’ approach to design is super powerful.”

And eventually, he was proven right. Helldivers 2’s chaotic warfare thrives off the things that happen by accident, from explosions flinging players across the map to grenades that accidentally get ‘returned to sender’. The word of mouth that emanated from that chaos helped catapult the game to massive success, and while it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing since launch, Helldivers 2 has been a runaway success for Arrowhead. And who knows, maybe it’s all down to that single rock.

Helldivers 2 boss told launch players not to buy until servers calmed down, and it “took 5 minutes until I got a call from the friendly people over at PlayStation asking what the f*** I was smoking”.

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