Why Helldivers Matters 10 Years Later

Helldivers 2 is still PlayStation’s premier live-service title, an anomaly standing on a pile of corpses that’s only growing with each passing quarter. The Starship Troopers-esque sequel took over in 2024, broke records, and was one of the feel-good stories in a year full of abject misery. But Helldivers 2 owes a lot of its success to the original Helldivers, which just hit its 10th anniversary. And even after all those years, Helldivers is still important today.

Helldivers is a little hard to return to now, though. The isometric view is limiting, the camera locks to the whole squad and doesn’t allow for much independence, its levels are a little on the barren side, and having to stay still while calling stratagems is cumbersome. The bombastic score and general chaos still make for a solid cooperative experience, but it holds little appeal over its beefier and streamlined (but not too streamlined) sequel.

RELATED: New Helldivers 2 Update Released With Important Fixes

The importance, rather, is more grand and lies in how Helldivers 2 built on the success of the first Helldivers. Helldivers was very much a first draft and a stepping stone that led Arrowhead Game Studios to success. The third-person camera, as Arrowhead noted, gives players a more visceral view of the action. The levels are much prettier and more dense this time around and feature some of the best-looking explosions in the medium. And not only can players move while calling in stratagems, but there are exponentially more now and that list continues to grow as the months pass.

They’re all considerable improvements that, for one reason or another, aren’t often afforded to many studios now. Immortals of Aveum, The Callisto Protocol, and Concord were all expensive games released by new teams and all three flopped and resulted in layoffs or, in Concord’s infamous case, an outright studio closure. All of the studios went for big triple-A, high-risk gambles right out of the gate instead of building up to that status. The Callisto Protocol developer Striking Distance Studios did create a smaller Hades-esque roguelite game in the Callisto universe called [REDACTED], which reviewed relatively well. However, given the terrible reception to its debut horror game and multiple rounds of layoffs at the studio that followed, it seems like it would have been better to start with a more modest game like [REDACTED] first.

It is increasingly rare that studios are able to fully blossom and realize their potential. Titles like Assassin’s Creed 2, Uncharted 2, and Mass Effect 2 are often brought up as sequels that far surpassed their originals, but that sort of jump isn’t as prevalent as it used to be and many of those examples of highly improved follow-ups are from previous generations. It’s a hodgepodge of chasing trends, putting developers on genres they don’t specialize in, and unrealistic expectations, all of which have haunted the teams behind titles like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Redfall, Hi-Fi Rush, Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Marvel’s Avengers, MultiVersus, and many, many more.

Arrowhead’s own site proudly claims that a “game for everyone is a game for no one,” and that’s clear in the original Helldivers. It’s got friendly fire that can’t be turned off and is often brutally difficult. It’s easy to envision an alternate timeline where, in order to justify a bigger budget, Sony Interactive Entertainment compelled Arrowhead to make Helldivers 2 a little more friendly, sand off every hard edge, and push hard into FOMO-exploiting monetization. Or what if Arrowhead tried to make a big third-person shooter like Helldivers 2 without the necessary buildup?

Instead, Helldivers 2 was able to flourish because of the time the studio took to figure out what worked and build toward that goal rather than rushing there from the jump. Current Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani even told GamesIndustry.biz that the developer “will see growth, but growth as a means to an ends, not as an end itself” and noted in a Reddit post that he wanted to “set things up in a sustainable way so that in the long term [the team] can make more and better stuff.” Those mantras are seemingly at odds with a vast chunk of the industry where hastily rushing toward endless growth is the goal, regardless of the obvious stupidity inherent to it and the havoc it wreaks.

This mentality seems to have been present for some time, as former Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt also told that very same outlet way back in 2016 that Arrowhead was experiencing “natural growth” to making slightly bigger games each time. Planning for the future and staying true to your values are rare traits and while that didn’t start with Helldivers in 2015, it, given the wild and unexpected success of Helldivers 2, serves as an obvious and important touchpoint a decade later.