Summary
- A single-player campaign would defeat the purpose of Helldivers 2, as the game thrives on multiplayer chaos and teamwork.
- Hero stories and character development have no place in this war game, where soldiers are replaceable and names don't matter.
- It's too late for a campaign in Helldivers 2, as the focus needs to remain on maintaining the live-service aspects and player satisfaction.
When first came out, what feels like a lifetime ago, I wrote about how it didn’t need a campaign but that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I still wished it had one. While the Game Master-guided emergent narrative makes for some pretty inte✤resting real-time storytelling, I still c🃏raved more insight into the lore and any semblance of a plot.
I don’t want that anymore, which is great, since developer Arrowhead’s CEO says 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it’s not going to happen. As someone who’s been dipping in and 🏅out of the game for months, I’ve learned over time what it is that makes it so compelling and drew me to log in several times a week for months before I finally burned out. While the narrative is pretty interesting – Arrowhead has managed to tell a pretty cool story about the conseq﷽uences of acting like an imperialistic, militaristic tool on the galactic stage – the gameplay is what makes Helldivers 2 so damn fun.
A Single-Player Campaign Defeats The Purpose
Necessarily, that requires multiplayer. That is how the game is designed to be played, and that’s where it shines most. When I first started playing, I was blown aw♚ay by just how funny it was to get smushed into a bloody, gory paste by a reinforcing squadmate, and how great it felt when you got a team of random players in matchmaking that was on the same wavelength as you, even without turning mics on. A single-player campaign wouldn’t feel the same, because it🐷 wouldn’t play the same.
‘But what about co-op campaigns?’ I hear you cry. This brings me to my next point – campaigns are generally hero stories. You want characters to root for? You want a meaningful story arc? There aren’t any, and that’s by design. Helldivers 2 is a game where the individual doesn’t matter. When your anonymous Helldiver dies, you’re immediately replaced with another anonym🐷ous Helldiver, and so on and so forth. There are no heroes in this war, just bodies thrown into battle, completely indistinguishable from each other and whose names don’t matter.
This is the entire point – 168澳ꦫ洲幸运5开奖网:just like in real life, war is 𝕴meaningless. Soldiers can’t grow or change if they’re dead, giving their lives in service of some abstract idea of victory. Without growth, development, and steady characters, what would a Helldivers꧒ 2 campaign look like? How would it complement an emergent na🌊rrative that is changing in real time? I’d love a prequel campaign, but that brings me to my third point…
It’s Too Late For A Campaign
Arrowhead is a live-service company, and not a massive one at that. says it has “120 employees and growing”, and consider💎ing the studio already seems to be struggling to keep up with the patching, balancing, and updating demands of a very popular live-service, there is absolutely no way it can put a campaign in the works without some serious expansion and reprioritising.
If a campaign was going to be included, it would have been when the game was first launched, but Arrowhead simply can’t afford to pivot now. There’s too much at stake with the live-service side already, and with player satisf💟action dipping in the wake of controversies and unpopular balance changes, it would be a big risk to start working on something that its CEO said🎶, correctly, would be “like building an entirely new game”.
We’ll just have to come to terms with the fact t൲hat there will likely never be a story campaign for Helldivers 2, and that it’s probably better this way. If we want Helldivers 2 to continue to be as good as it is now, or even better, Arrowhead has to stay focused on the game that’s already out there, instead of the one that exists inside our imaginations. For $40, I think it’s already pretty great.
Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.