"We are growing Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3" says Arrowhead CCO Pilestedt, and he's taking design suggestions for the massive miniguns everyone wants

With the calendar having rolled into 2025, the studio behind one of last year's biggest games certainly doesn't sound like it plans to rest on its laurels. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead's CCO and longtime figurehead Johan Pilestedt has seemigly suggested that the long-term plan could well end up being this second game "growing into" its successor through updates.

Yep, while plenty of folks have spent their holidays battling The Illuminate, after Arrowhead just about managed to clam down that pricing backlash against the game's Killzone crossover gear, Pilestedt's been chatting to some of them on the socials about what the future may hold.

In one Twitter thread just before Christmas, the developer responded to someone asking about the possibility of Helldivers 2 being updated to allow eight player co-op at some point. The answer - for now at least - was no, with Pilestedt saying the game's "engine, network architecture, UI, performance and difficulty can't cope" with eight players at once right now.

He added that while it would require "significant investment", this kind of thing is "not impossible, and its something we talk about often at the studio". The next bit might be the most interesting part of the response, though.

Albeit in reponse to a joke that Helldivers 3 will drop in 2032 with that eight player limit and swimming, Pilestedt said: "We are growing Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3.... so you may be correct. Except maybe swimming - I don't think its possible to swim in a heavy plate carrier with rifle and support weapons."

Naturally, this has provoked plenty of chatter on the game's subreddit. There's a good deal of support for it, at least in theory, given the game's been out for less than a year and folks are keen for Arrowhead to keep focusing on creating sigificant updates for it in the immediate future.

Though, some do have concerns, with user pokiane writing: "You have to wonder though how limiting their ancient engine will be. I'm all for just adding stuff to the game instead of making a 3rd one, but it'd be a damn shame if we lose out on big new features (more than 4 players, gigantic maps, more enemy variety and so on) because of it."

While letting folks debate that amongst themselves, Pilestedt's gotten busy chatting about something else that could be coming to Helldivers 2 in the future - full-size miniguns. "There are things we want to do before that," he wrote in response to one Reddit user posting a video of a dude firing what looks to be a Nerf minigun, "Miniguns as a carried weapon are notoriously problematic, you can see this in every video of people hip-firing a minigun - they are more or less thrown backwards by the insane recoil.

"The way we would solve this is to have players be moved backwards unless they take up a steady firing position. This would probably also apply to the HMG (which was added maybe a bit prematurely). In addition, the backpack magazine is needed, and unfortunately - the game currently doesn't support a weapon occupying 2 slots which will have to be resolved before a minigun can be added. After all that is done, 5.5mm minigun will be ready to be deployed."

He finished up be asking if folks have "any other design suggestions for how to realize a minigun in Helldivers", so make sure to tell him if you do - it looks like someone's already put the idea of the gun working with stamina drain-based recoil in his head.