Helldivers 2 continues to be one of the most successful live-service shooters available despite having been on shelves and in people's digital libraries for a considerable amount of time. That's largely thanks to its developer, Arrowhead Game Studios, and its continued of the game with frequent updates and polish. However, as I learned recently, it is also due to a number of key design decisions that shaped the game before it even got into players' hands.

Helldivers 2's balance is divisive, to say the least, with some fans appreciating the effort that Arrowhead Game Studios has put into making it work - myself included - while others feel it's either too hard or too easy. Well, those detractors may feel differently now, as a former design director has spoken out about the challenges the game faced during the development stage, and how Helldivers 2 once had bigger squads, but they were cut for one crucial reason.

Helldivers 2 Could Have Had 5-Player Squads

It Was Originally Designed That Way

During a Q&A hosted on the official Arrowhead Game Studio's YouTube Channel, former Helldivers 2 design director, Patrik Lasota, discussed how the game had initially been designed around accommodating five players, rather than the teams of four fans get to be a part of now. Despite being a rather unconventional team size - most battle royales, for example, allow for a maximum team size of four - the team at Arrowhead Game Studios thought it best fit the structure and style of gameplay it was going for.

It is worth noting that the original Helldivers also had a max team size of four players, so the fact that Arrowhead eventually switched to a smaller party size isn't all that surprising. After all, four players are just enough to take on Helldivers 2's excellent Illuminate faction, which started causing problems for players the second they got comfortable fending off hordes of Terminids and Automatons. However, there was actually a specific reason why Arrowhead eventually culled the team size in Helldivers 2 for the final launch, and why teams of five likely won't be coming in the future.

Cutting Squad Size Wasn’t An Arbitrary Decision

It Prevented The Game From Feeling Unbalanced

Speaking during that Q&A, Lasota explained that teams of five felt unbalanced and unfun. It wasn't strictly that a team of five made the game easier - although I can absolutely understand how it would - but rather that five people created an imbalance in how players would split off from one another. Typically, players are encouraged to break off into teams of two so they're better equipped to deal with Helldivers 2's steep difficulty, but when there are five players, Lasota felt there was always one who was missing out. He explained:

“When you’re four people playing, if a fifth s you, suddenly you’re a three stack and a two stack, it creates this unbalance. But if you’re five people and someone s, you’re two three stacks, and you’re three groups instead of one becoming a pair [...] It turns out, when you’re five people, someone is always just standing around, not really participating in the action.”

I'm not particularly surprised by this, as while that fifth player would be helpful in certain mission types, or for throwing grenades into Terminid nests, almost all of Helldivers 2's objectives require two people to complete them. Imagine being the third wheel as two other players realign a scanner or turn on a group of generators. Lasota also explained that having five people broke stratagems. He said "you didn’t really have to make any choices when it came to stratagems," as that fifth person could just bring whatever the other four couldn't fit. That really would have broken the game.

4-Player Helldivers 2 Squads Are The Right Balance

It Allows For The Perfect Amount Of Strategy

I really do feel that four-player Helldivers 2 squads are perfectly balanced. They limit the number of stratagems people can drop with, they ensure that no one is excluded from the various minigames - unless you die and a duo respawns you with them, rather than your original partner for some reason - and they also prevent players from just dropping four 500kg bombs into a Bile Titan. It keeps the level of difficulty up, while also ensuring that the game never gets boring.

It has also made it abundantly clear that while some of Helldivers 2's weapons are broken, the balancing behind the scenes has done wonders for the game, and made it the tremendous success it is today. As much as I have found it easy to moan and complain about Helldivers 2 in the past, the team at Arrowhead Game Studios has truly created a masterpiece, and that wouldn't have been possible without crucial design decisions like this.

Switching from five players to four may seem like a negligible decision, but the ramifications a larger squad could have had on the overall game flow is clear. While it may be disappointing that I won't be able to rope a fifth friend into a gaming session, I'm glad that Helldivers 2's squad sizes were cut before it was released. Helldivers 2 remains one of my all-time favorite co-op games and I suspect a game that will live on for quite sometime before Arrowhead reveals whatever other masterpiece it has been cooking up.

Source: Arrowhead Game Studios/YouTube