Former Helldivers 2 CEO says time-to-kill is ‘too high’, promises weapon rebalance

Most live service games end up going through a rough period of development every so often. Just look at Destiny 2, for example! Helldivers 2, however, is practically speedrunning in this respect. Thankfully, things are slowly settling down now that the former CEO, Johan Pilestedt, is back in action.

More specifically, after the review bombing of Helldivers 2 and the game’s questionable balancing updates, the former CEO decided it was time for him to give up the business side of things and refocus on the game itself. Thus, Pilestedt stepped down from his position of CEO to step into the shoes of Helldivers 2‘s chief creative officer and chairman. Unsurprisingly, Pilestedt already has some promising ideas on where to take Helldivers 2 next, and many of them stem from the game’s time-to-kill or TTK.

Moving forward, Johan Pilestedt has big plans for Helldivers 2 balance

According to Pilestedt, who’s been responding to various community questions on Twitter, he intends to get more developers to spend hands-on time with the game’s current sandbox. He also wants to take the players’ own sentiments into account while handling balancing questions in order to create a “holistic view of WHY feedback is given.” Hard to complain about that! The TTK bit is particularly interesting, however, as Pilestedt feels that many of the players’ issues with Helldivers 2 stem from the fact that the game’s time-to-kill is simply too high.

Thankfully, this doesn’t appear to mean that Arrowhead will simply carve a chunk out of each enemy’s health and call it. Weapon balancing, too, is on the menu.

Overall, then, this could be the big turning point that the community has been waiting for. If Pilestedt can rally Arrowhead and begin enacting positive, meaningful changes to Helldivers 2‘s current sandbox, the game might yet correct its course and reinvigorate the players to jump back into the thick of it.

That’s not to say that Helldivers 2 is in any real trouble, of course, but the game’s biggest subreddit has grown increasingly negative as time goes on, with most players eagerly anticipating Arrowhead’s next move. As one would expect, some players have already been hard at work deconstructing Pilestedt’s tweets with hard statistics to back their arguments with:

And, really, Arrowhead would do well to take into account this particularly passionate section of the community. So far, it seems that this is precisely what’s going on behind the scenes, but we won’t know what’s really up with the game’s sandbox until a few more balancing updates drop in.

For one, I’m thrilled with the fact that Arrowhead Games is at least reverting the massively bolstered enemy patrol spawns sometime down the line. Playing Helldivers 2 solo has never been quite as problematic as it’s been as of late, but with a balance patch or two and some engaging new content, a solution is already on the horizon. Let’s see how it pans out!