‘Helldivers 2’ director says fans shouldn’t ‘compare’ game to ‘Halo’

‘Helldivers 2’ director Johan Pilested has insisted fans shouldn’t “compare” the game to ‘Halo’.

The third-person-shooter, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, allows players to team up and fight against aliens and robots across a number of planets, which has sparked some comparisons to Bungie and 343 Industries’ sci-fi title.

But Johan has since taken to social media to end the “rivalry” fans have created between the two franchises.

Responding to a fan on X who said “everyone knows it’s the truth” that ‘Helldivers 2’ is better than ‘Halo’, the Arrowhead boss wrote: “Why compare? Just let games love and enjoy both, either or neither.

“We need more compassion and union in the world, and less rivalry.”

The title has proven to a huge success, beating ‘God of War: Ragnarok’ to be PlayStation’s most popular game on PC, having reached 400,000 concurrent players on Steam.

Johan since theorised that the secret behind ‘Helldivers 2’s success was its lack of a “pay-to-win” model, and emphasised that all titles needed to “earn the right to monetise”.

Taking to X, he wrote: “We really applied ourselves to not make it [pay-to-win] even though items are functionally different.

"The only item that's (pay-to-win) is the revolver – which will win you any 'cool gun' competition. "Only (minor) problem is that it’s not that good.”

In a later post, he added: “‘You have to earn the right to monetise’ – I truly believe that. If people want to support this title they have an option, but we are never forcing anyone to do so.”

Due to its immense popularity, some players experienced performance issues that made ‘Helldivers 2’ nearly unplayable, and the studio insisted it was “working around the clock” to improve the game’s stability.

In a post to the company’s internal Discord server, developer Misty wrote: “Earlier tonight we had server related issues with a concurrent player spike. This lead to some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out.

“Our team is working around the clock to solve these issues. While we’ve been able to mitigate some of the causes, we are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all of our Helldivers.

“Therefore, we’ve had to cap our concurrent players to around 450,000 to further improve server stability. We will continue to work with our partners to get the ceiling raised.

“If you have progression related issues, please restart the game in order for things to sync back up. Thank you for your continued patience.”