As hit co-op shooter Helldivers 2 nears its first anniversary after a year of many ups and downs, Arrowhead CCO and creative director Johan Pilestedt is taking a much-deserved personal break away from the video game development trenches.
The creative announced his decision to take a step back to recharge batteries and focus on his personal life via X/Twitter, without specifying how long the sabbatical would be. According to him, he’s been “living” Helldivers 2 since early 2016 on top of shepherding its predecessor since 2013, making the total amount of years dedicated to a single IP roughly 11. Understandably, he’s been wanting to spend some quality family (and friends) time for a good while.
This won’t impact Arrowhead’s operations nor Helldiver 2’s live service, which reached the end of 2024 with a third faction from the first game that was missing: the Illuminate. The next big step for the ambitious online shooter as it enters its second year of life is a bit unclear, but Operations and Major/Personal Orders continue to roll non-stop while we wait for new weapons, vehicles, and foes to squash with the power of democracy. What about an expansion into Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 in the future? We’ll have to wait and see.
On the horizon for Arrowhead and Helldivers, there’s also the important matter of a live-action film adaptation set at Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions that will surely remind us of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) quite a bit once it hits theaters in the future given everything the two Helldivers games borrow from the sci-fi classic. It’s been stated that Arrowhead will supervise the adaptation, but the approach will be largely hands-off, since the studio isn’t “Hollywood people” and doesn’t “know what it takes to make a movie” according to Pilestedt.
The creative director also took advantage of this opportunity to tease he’ll be jumping into the development of Arrowhead’s all-new game once he returns. Could a return to the world of Magicka be on the cards? We’re as curious as you are, but let’s refocus on squashing giant bugs and evil robots for now.
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