Yes, Helldivers 2 keeps getting cool new stratagems because its devs get bored and chat about stuff like mechs
Also, not shooting your teammates like an idiot is apparently a form of “very primal creative problem solving”.
You know all those nice little stratagems you pack away in your little backpack whenever you take a nice little holiday to the alien-infested battlefields of Helldivers 2? Well, it turns out that the main impetus behind the game continually getting a steady stream of fresh ones is because its developers start getting tired of the current selection on offer.
To be fair, with the game’s worlds boasting hazards like heavy enemies that’ve thankfully now had their spawn rates tweaked to avoid being too overpowering and new flying bugs that definitely aren’t a thing (they are), having a regularly supply of fresh ways to deal with them’s pretty useful. It’s also pretty cool that they seem to be coming about via some casual chats the game’s devs keep having, presumably while mid-sandwich chomp during their lunch breaks.
Yes, in a Playstation Blog interview, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt’s offered some insight as to how new stratagems come to be. No, it doesn’t involve a mummy and daddy stratagem who love each other very much and spend a while ‘hugging’ in private, or some birds and bees.
“All-in-all, stratagems are generally designed in an iterative and sprint based fashion. We play the game and get bored by the current selection, so we add another one,” the developer revealed. “Maybe a designer that has an idea, such as the walking barrage, or something more advanced.”
Pilestedt went on to give the specific example of the Exo-44 Walker. “That came about by the team saying ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a mech?’,” he explained, “Then the process started. What would a mech be like in this universe? What would the armament be? What would be the strengths and weaknesses of a mech? It all comes back to believability.”
The developer also offered some insight as to how a lot of the general ideas for stratagems come about. “We’re interested in both war movies and pop culture, so in some cases the concept may be inspired by a pop-culture reference,” he outlined, “but realism is added by taking real world guns and applying them to the mechanics.”
So, there you go, if you’re hoping a specific new stratagem will arrive in the game, you best bet is pray that Arrowhead’s chatter and pop culture consumption habits align with your own.
Also, if you’ve ever avoided accidentally shooting one of your buddies in the game, since you know, friendly fire is a thing in it, congratulations. According to Pilestedt in another part of the interview, you’ve successfully engaged in some “very primal creative problem solving”.
What does that mean? Well, “believability”. “If your bullets can kill enemies, and the enemies can kill you, then logic dictates that your bullets must also be able to kill your friends," the developer explained, adding that this helps “create a complexity to the gameplay where players have to actively think during combat sequences – not in a ‘solve the puzzle’ way, but instead in a very primal creative problem solving way.”