While Helldivers 2 makes use of quite a bit of procedural generation for its levels, one player took to social media to ask Arrowhead Game Studios whether there were any plans for an endless roguelite mode that would pit players against constant waves of different enemies on a single map. Studio CCO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt responded to this player by noting that the developer actually has a prototype of this idea internally.
He noted that, through internal testing, the studio has also discovered that this kind of rogue-lite mode brings in fundamental changes to Helldivers 2. In his post, Pilestedt said: “Hey! We have a prototype of a rogue-lite mode – it changes the game fundamentally!”
He didn’t really go into more details about this. As for what kind of fundamental changes it might bring to the game, there can be several ways in which Helldivers 2 would need to be re-balanced for such a mode. Our guess would be that, among the required changes to the game for this mode would be the number of respawns allowed through the Reinforcement stratagem, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of various other stratagems. Depending on the size of the map, there would also be the question of how effective vehicles might be for the game mode.
Arrowhead Game Studios has continued its streak of post-launch support for Helldivers 2 through the release of several updates. While the studio wanted to take a break from releasing more content for the game earlier this year in favour of focusing on bringing in some much-needed optimisations, it hasn’t stopped releasing new content entirely.
Earlier this month, Helldivers 2 saw an update that introduced magma worlds to the co-op shooter. These worlds have been described as being inhospitable for humans and “too explosive for tourism”, and serve as locations where players can take on Automaton forces.
PC players also have plenty to look forward to with future update, since the studio had started testing out a beta branch of Helldivers 2 that would radically shorten the storage space requirements of the game. These testing efforts were discussed earlier this month, where the studio explained that it had managed to bring down the storage requirements of Helldivers 2 from around 154 GB all the way down to 23 GB, resulting in a savings of around 131 GB.
The developers were able to achieve this by largely getting rid of duplicated assets that it was using to ensure that loading times wouldn’t get too bad for players still using hard drives rather than solid state drives. In its investigations, Arrowhead Game Studios discovered that getting rid of duplicated files “will result in minimal changes to load times – seconds at most.”
Helldivers 2 is available on PC, PS5, and as of earlier this year, Xbox Series X/S. For more details about the co-op shooter’s Xbox release, check out our review. Also check out details of some of the bigger updates that the game has gotten, like Into the Unjust.
