“We are growing Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3” says Arrowhead CCO Pilestedt, and he’s taking design suggestions for the massive miniguns everyone wants

With the calendar turning towards 2025, the studio behind one of last year’s biggest games certainly isn’t resting on its laurels. Helldivers 2 Developer Arrowhead’s PR director and longtime figurehead Johan Pilestedt seemed to suggest that the long-term plan may well end with the second game “growing into” its successor through updates.

Yes, although many people spent their holidays fight against enlightenmentafter Arrowhead almost managed to hush it up price reaction against the game Kill zone crossover, Pilestedt chatted with some of them on social media about what the future holds.

In a Twitter thread just before Christmas, the developer responded to a question about the possibility of updating Helldivers 2 to allow eight-player co-op at some point. The answer – at least for now – was no, with Pilestedt saying that the “game engine, network architecture, user interface, performance and complexity cannot cope” with eight players simultaneously right now.

He added that while it would require a “significant investment”, such things “are not impossible, and we talk about this often in the studio.” However, the next part of the answer may be the most interesting.

Although in response to a joke about Helldivers 3 coming out in 2032 with an eight-player limit and swimming, Pilestedt said: “We’re turning Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3…. so maybe you’re right. Except maybe swimming—I don’t want to.” I don’t think it’s possible to sail in a heavy ironclad with a rifle and auxiliary weapons.”

Naturally, this caused a lot of talk on game subreddit. There’s good support for this, at least in theory, considering the game has been out for less than a year and people want Arrowhead to continue to focus on making significant updates for it in the near future.

However, some have their doubts: user pokiane writes: “You have to wonder how limiting their ancient engine will be. I’m all for just adding stuff to the game instead of making a third one, but it would be a damn shame if we lost big new features (more than 4 players, giant maps, more variety of enemies, etc.) because of it. d.)”.

While letting people talk about it among themselves, Pilestedt started discussing something else that might be coming to Helldivers 2 in the future – full-size miniguns. “There are things we want to do before then,” he wrote in response to one Reddit user who posted a video of a dude shooting what looked like a Nerf minigun. “Miniguns as portable weapons are notoriously problematic, you can see that every video of people shooting a minigun they are more or less thrown back due to the insane recoil.

“We could solve this problem by forcing players to move backwards if they are not in a stable firing position. This probably also applies to the machine gun (which was added perhaps a little prematurely). Additionally, a backpack magazine is required, and unfortunately the game does not currently support weapons that take up 2 slots, and this will need to be addressed before a minigun can be added. After all this, the 5.5mm minigun will be ready for use.”

At the end he asked if people “have any other design suggestions for how to implement a minigun in Helldivers” so be sure to tell him if so – it looks like someone has already floated the idea of ​​having a pistol worked with recoil based on stamina depletion in his head.