The journey of creating Helldivers 2 has been full of ups and downs for Swedish developer Arrowhead Game Studios. The first Helldivers 2 game was a shoot ’em-up action game, however, the studio completely ditched that concept for the sequel. The process of creating the first game was quite complicated for Arrowhead, so it tried to avoid all the mistakes it made the first time.
Unfortunately, fate had other plans as Helldivers 2‘s development process became far more complicated, especially because the developers were using a game engine that got discontinued while they were working on the game. Another reason why Helldivers 2‘s development took so long was the fact that Arrowhead decided to skip pre-production.
The development of Helldivers 2 was far more complex than Helldivers
Johan Pilestedt, the Chief Creative Officer of Arrowhead Game Studios, recently talked about Helldivers 2 at the 2025 Game Developers Conference. During the conversation, Pilestedt revealed how Arrowhead initially planned to not repeat the same mistakes it made with Helldivers while developing Helldivers 2, however, it turned out to be much more challenging.
Pilestedt explained that while developing the first game, the studio overcomplicated the process by coming up with new ideas. Unfortunately, the deadline didn’t allow them to work on all of them (via PCGamer),
We were throwing around some ideas, and then we got a little cautious because we’ve been burned before by making games that are a little bit too complicated for what we’re capable of, and then having to crunch. It takes so much energy – So we said, ‘This will be easy. We can probably do it in four years.’
Pilestedt revealed that it took almost eight years to finish the game. There were various reasons behind it but skipping pre-production was one of the main. The studio headed straight into production, which turned out to be a really bad idea as per Pilestedt.
Helldivers 2 was also delayed because its game engine was discontinued during production
Since its inception, Arrowhead has used a lesser-known game engine called Bitsquid (renamed to Autodesk Stingray in 2014) to develop its video games. 2015’s Helldivers was also made on this engine, so naturally, the studio began the development of the sequel on this game engine.
What no one expected was that Autodesk would discontinue the game engine in the middle of the game’s development, leaving the developers with no support. Helldivers 2 was finally released in February 2024, six years after official support ended. The process was challenging, but it was worth it because Helldivers 2 is quite different from its competitors as the mechanics, movement, combat, etc, everything feels different.
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