Helldivers 2’s D&D influence, which supports a 10-million-player-strong role-playing campaign, made its way into the game “about halfway through development,” according to former lead writer Russ Nickel.
Speaking to Inverse, Nickel revealed that his history as a D&D dungeon master “has been so helpful for game writing.” Not only did Nickel need the know-how to build a galaxy-spanning sandbox plan, but more crucially, he had “to be able to let go of those plans” to react to players.
“I love how collaborative it is,” he continues. “It’s so crazy to me that right now there’s a dungeon master who is playing a game with 10 million people, and they’re all collaborating on a story.”
Nickel isn’t alone in the sentiment either. Helldivers 2 players have collectively pushed the game through one interesting twist after another, and developer Arrowhead Studios has been more than willing to play ball by canonizing the community’s most-contested planet with an in-game Memorial Day, encouraging players to collaborate on Major Orders, and even replying to a fan-made campaign to review bomb the game.
“This feels like what live service was born to do,” Nickel says. “For a while, Arrowhead didn’t know if the sequel was going to be a live-service title. But as we talked about it more, it was clear that this would make for such a cool live service experience, one where the story can change constantly so it really does feel alive.”
The idea to update the live service like a D&D campaign came in “about halfway through development” because the team “were just building the game to be playable” at first. “The back half of development was adding in the narrative and figuring out exactly what that playable prototype would become.”
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