While Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has announced a sabbatical, Arrowhead Game Studios reassured fans that it will keep the title alive in the meantime.
On the official Helldivers 2 Discord, studio CEO Shams Jorjani wanted to reassure fans that development will continue “as long as people play”. He also said that work won’t stop even if it continues for 10 more years.
“As long as people play, pay, and we can build a business case around it, we’ll support it to hell and back,” said Jorjani, according to GamesRadar. “If we can keep it going for 10 years, we will.”
He went on to talk about Pilestedt’s break from development and how it won’t do much to affect the pace of development on Helldivers 2 moving forward.
“The lead for the game is Mikael Eriksson and has been for the last few years,” explained Jorjani. “Johan’s role as a senior creative is to support all our projects. So he’ll absolutely still be involved – in the same way he’s been the past year – gives input on high-level plans and collaborates with designers on some stuff.” As Jorjani states, “The vast majority of Helldivers is a team effort – it’s not one figure.”
While Pilestedt was important in key creative areas of Helldivers and its sequel, Jorjani said that there were many others at the studio that helped in getting the game developed.
The title doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing players, however – it wrapped up its first calendar year with more than 15 million players.
Pilestedt announced his sabbatical earlier this week, stating that he needed the break after having worked on the Helldivers franchise almost non-stop since 2013.
“11 years of working ‘around the clock’ on the same IP has made me set aside family, friends and my lovely wife… and myself,” posted Pilestedt when he announced his sabbatical. “I am going to take some time now to redeem what was lost from all of those who supported me for over a decade.”
Before this, he almost immediately kicked off a game jam with his friends from the studio. While the result didn’t turn out too great, he mentioned that the team enjoyed it and that sometimes the journey itself is the destination.
Helldivers 2 recently received an update that brought fixes for crashes related to Illuminate missions. This includes a fix for a crash related to Illuminate ships despawning and jittering from players trying to use ADS with a scoped weapon.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5. For more details on the title, check out our review from launch.
