As the Helldivers 2 community formally piles into Malevelon Creek for a surprise Major Order following a failed operation, creative director and Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt says the studio is talking about ways to make such orders easier to understand.
To give you the short version, the previous Major Order failed in no small part because planets adjacent to the target planets, Ubanea and Tibit, were either important but easy to miss, or unimportant but easy to misread. The whole thing got pretty confusing, and has redoubled discussion about how the supply lines connecting Major Order targets can be conveyed.
As the Helldivers Alerts Twitter spotted, one player, Thekrzysiek, created a mockup of what clearly denoted supply lines could look like. It seems Pilestedt is a fan of the idea, at the very least.
“It is surprisingly close to what we had in the game before,” the director said of the fan-made supply lines. “But we wanted to visualize all of the supply lines and it got way too cluttered. We are talking about making this more clear internally at the studio.”
If, when, and how such a tool may be released in-game remains to be seen, but especially after this confusing weekend, I don’t think Helldivers 2 players would complain about some added direction on key targets in Major Orders. Even for veteran players tuned into what high command is cooking, it can be tough to immediately discern the order that we’ll need to liberate planets. Maybe managed democracy can be better managed after all.
Pilestedt’s “childhood dream” is for the co-op shooter to join the pantheon of PlayStation’s biggest IP: “It’s crazy that it might be in the future.”
