Game:

Helldivers (2015)

Duration: 14:20

1,061 views

13

The talented folks at Arrowhead Game Studio (Magicka, The Showdown Effect) are working on what cannot be referred to as a topdown Starship Troopers for copyright reasons - the PS3, PS4, and PS Vita title Helldivers.

Over the years we've had lots of chats with Johan Pilestedt, CEO and game director, about his games and the familiar tone shines through in this interview as we try and get him to spill as many beans as possible. The top down shooter offers four player co-op with friendly fire most assuredly on and an innovative system of strategems (abilities the players take with them into battle, stuff like revive, turrets, orbital strikes) to players equip ahead of the mission.

"It is unforgiving, especially when you're not really thinking five seconds ahead. If you just do things on a short-term basis then you will eventually screw things up for both yourself and your friends. This happen even when you join a game, say two people are playing and you grab a controller and press start. You drop in in one of these helipods and you smash both other guys. That has actually happened several times. So just adding that extra guy to the mix isn't usually... I mean it's not a win-win situation, it could be quite a devastating move."

Pilestedt also went on to explain the system for stratagems (a total of 30-40 are planned at this stage), where the wait for the ordered help to materials is key to making the game enjoyable.

"It's like a die roll in a board game. Like you have the suspense of inputting the combination that's sort of shaking the die. And then you use the ability and then you have a duration of maybe 5 up to 15 seconds before you actually get what you ordered. Because they need to prepare it in space. No. It's basically just because we want that suspense."

While there is a certain sandbox feel to each mission (various objectives you can approach in any order, random encounters, etc.) there is a greater objective of taking out three alien races in a global campaign meta game:

"Everybody that's playing the game are trying to win this war against these three alien species. And you push these borders together. That will create a global effort to win the war. Each mission that you select is, or rather you select a planet that you are personally responsible for handling, a during this mission you have up to maybe 7, 10 missions to do or as low as 2. And these missions are procedurally generated so every mission follows the same formula. You select your drop zone. You drop in with your set loadout. And then you find the objectives that you got earlier on. And these can vary from like escort missions, destroy missions and all the classical archetypes you would see in any action movie or read of in any book or military guide or whatever your preferred poison is."

Working with Sony on first party terms is a different experience and relieves the studio of a lot of detail work.

"All of the things that usually the customer or gamer doesn't know about. The troubles of localisation, getting legal stuff for... such a simple thing as fonts. All of those things are just being taken out of the way. And it really allows us to focus on games development."

So what does he think about the PS4 and the new Dual Shock 4? Nice working on it?

"The PS4. Yes... yes. I approve. And the controller is just wonderful. I really like it."

You'll be able to drop in with Helldivers on PS3, PS4 and PS Vita sometime next year.


www.gamereactor.tv

Join us @ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Gamereactor