Helldivers 2 Devs Will Be Watching While You Play And Effecting Things In Real Time To Keep Gameplay Fresh
Helldivers 2 changes a lot compared to the first game, one of the biggest being the switch to a third-person view and combat style.
One of its most important changes however, is so baked into how the game works that you’ll never really see it when it happens.
In a PlayStation Access interview with deputy game director Sagar Beroshi from Arrowhead Studios, Beroshi revealed that while you’re playing Helldivers 2, team members at Arrowhead are watching, and can effect the game your currently playing, in real time.
Not just developers of course, Arrowhead has also developed a “suite of tools” to help ensure that everyone playing can have unique experiences, but there is indeed a team constantly watching, acting like a games master or dungeon master.
Fans of tabletop RPG’s should appreciate that this idea came from the developers playing those games, and wanting to take the idea of a live, always online game to a new level.
Beroshi also confirmed that this feature will be utilized to its full effect, meaning that while Arrowhead will continue to support the game with DLC and new content, it’ll also constantly be guiding the story based on how players are playing.
That means as you continue to liberate planets, Arrowhead will be actively designing how your enemies respond, and how things may have changed the next time you log on.
Beroshi emphasizes that players who jump in from the beginning will be able to experience the totality of that story, a long saga drawn out across what Arrowhead hopes will be a long time.
“So, in a lot of tabletop gaming you have a dungeon master or a game master, right? We also have a game master in this game,” Beroshi begins.
“It’s very hard to achieve exactly what you get at a table, but we wanted flavours of that into this game. This is not a minor part of our game, this is a significant feature that we’ve designed that is, by the way, somewhat different from the first game, something that we’re really excited to talk about.
We have a suite of tools, and a suite of real life human beings, okay? Not just AI bots, right, that are doing this, that are observing the gameplay as it’s happening and responding in real time.”
The interviewer asks, clarifying “So like servers in Arrowhead, and then they’re watching people play, and then they’re talking to them?”
“That’s right,” says Beroshi. He continues to explain that during a preview play session PlayStation Access had, one of his teammates was watching their game, and dropped in a high-powered bomb to help them defeat a giant enemy.
“One of our team members was observing your play style and debated what to do, and was like ‘I’m going to drop them this extra strategy.”
“You were playing with us, at the same time you’re playing with each other playing against the bad guys,” Beroshi says.
An absolute wild feature to think about, that when some last minute, clutch weapon or bomb is the thing that brings home your victory, or the lack of it on top of a new, extra challenge can come from the mercy of someone at Arrowhead.
“We have this game master functionality where we can drop in things like buffs, but sometimes de-buffs will happen too. A good challenge sometimes can be really valuable.”
Beroshi goes on to reference the previous play session PlayStation Access had, asking the interviewer to imagine if they had to hold a position for twice as long as they did, or deal with some other big threat.
“Especially at the higher difficulties, those marginal differences could be the difference between success and failure, in the mission, there are a bunch of things we can do with this.
If you think of a traditional live game, we tend to think of a live experience as constituting of a series of parts, we want to model a different type of live service here.
Something that’s just specific for this game and specific for the people we’re building for…
So there’s this meta narrative going on that’s playing out at the galactic level based on what actions the community takes. The war therefore, that you’re playing in plays out almost in real time.
It’s not like in a few weeks the entire war is over, this is a galactic battle. So people who join us, players who join us from day one, they’re going to experience the entirety of the full story arc, they’ll see everything, all the way through as it unfolds, as Super Earth, arrogant as it is, digs itself into deeper and deeper problems.”
Source – [PlayStation Access]
