Helldivers 2 devs once considered a licensed cosmetic system that basically let you hallucinate a different world

rockpapershotgun.com:

Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have been voluble lately about potentially adding elements from other sci-fi worlds to the shooter, with chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt rubbing his hands gleefully at the prospect of partnerships with Warhammer, Alien, the Fifth Element, and more besides. Speaking at the G-STAR Conference in Busan earlier this month, recently appointed chief executive officer Shams Jorjani confirmed that Arrowhead are looking into such collaborations, giving the example of refitting your dropship to look like one of Halo's Pelicans, or introducing the Zerg from Blizzard's Starcraft as an enemy faction.

Jorjani cautioned listeners, however, that these injections of third-party DNA need to look and feel appropriate to the setting. After all, if you start fecklessly chucking the Zerg, Chaos Space Marines or Fifth Element's, er, flying taxis into Helldivers 2, it might spoil the meticulous coherency of a game in which saluting protects you against lethal falls and some guy called Joel is running the universe. The funny part is that according to Jorjani, Arrowhead once envisaged a system that would get round the problem of inconsistency by essentially making third-party cosmetics, including whole map skins, visible only to players who have them enabled. To put that another way, Arrowhead once envisaged a system in which individual Helldivers would hallucinate other licenses.

I feel a little guilty about writing this up, because it's based on an automatic Google translation of an article in Korean, and automatic translations aren't always reliable. But also, it's fun. Find the relevant extract from Jorjani's answer below. I would focus on the spirit of the statements rather than the specific wording.

We've discussed a cosmetic system in the past where only what the gamer sees changes. For example, in the case of 'Dota 2', when applying a map skin, the user's map will appear to have changed, but others will see it as the default map. However, this