Arrowhead initially planned to make Helldivers 2 in 3 years—instead it took 7 years, 11 months, and 26 days, but 'grit, camaraderie and compassion' saw the team through
Helldivers 2, despite having somerecent growing pains, is nonetheless an overall triumph for developer Arrowhead Games. You don't just get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players a mere smattering of months after release without, you know, being a good videogame.
Helldivers 2 is a major success now that its launch is in the rear-view—with an amount of copies sold larger than the population of Sweden and former CEO, now CCO Johan Pilestedt dreaming of the studio becoming next FromSoftware. But things didn't always look so bright, as revealed in a talk Pilestedt gave at Nordic Game 2024 this year.
«We got asked if we wanted to do a sequel to Helldivers, and we said 'yeah, I think that sounds like a lot of fun, because it'll be easy'. We already know the game … could probably do it in [three years],» reveals Pilestedt, before clicking to the next slide where a giant 'WRONG' stamp layers over his presentation. «Yeah. This was wrong. That's an incorrect assumption.»
Pilestedt proceeds to drop the 500kg bomb that Helldivers 2 took, instead, 7 years, 11 months, and 26 days to create—over twice as long as the intended development time.
«How can we take a game that was supposed to be in development for three years, and almost end up at eight? And how did we manage to survive during that time?» Pilestedt asks. «Apparently, game development is hard, so they say—and the reason why game development is hard is that it's not a straight line.»
Pilestedt presents a development cycle fraught with industry-standard problems, the kind that typically lock studios into a never-ending rut of development hell: «It is iterative. You have to change your mind. You have to retry things, and evolve things, and a lot of times you try different things and come back to the original design because that was clearly the best one.»
But there were also other factors, as Pilestedt lays out.
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