Embrace Your Creativity: Arrowhead Invites Players to Build Unique Sandcastles in Helldivers 2’s Cosmic Adventure

Image by courtesy of Arrowhead Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The 2025 DICE Awards marked a memorable evening for Helldivers 2 creators Arrowhead Studios. The frenzied cooperative action shooter garnered four awards throughout the event, affording Arrowhead’s chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt and deputy game director Mauricio Redondo multiple opportunities to visit the press room. This in turn gave us a chance to gain insights into their creative aspirations following a year of immense achievements (and occasional challenges).

Our primary inquiry was about the future direction for the game’s “Galactic Campaign” mode. Without question, it is one of Helldivers 2‘s defining features, as the “campaign” brings players together with shared objectives that influence the tide of Tall Earth’s struggle against the enormous bugs and lethal robots jeopardizing Managed Democracy. The feature, managed by a “game master” named Joel, establishes a dynamic online environment where Arrowhead can respond to player surges in success—or catastrophic failures—without needing a new patch or content update.

During DICE, Pilestedt and Redondo mentioned there are still many avenues to explore within the Campaign mode, expressing that the team is developing ways to provide the player community with “more agency” to shape the galaxy in the forthcoming months. “Our goal is for the community to create their own sandcastles…and for Joel to stomp on them,” Pilestedt stated.

Related:Helldivers 2 has a god and his name is Joel

Player Unification in Helldivers 2

He elaborated that the Campaign’s greatest strength lies in fostering player “unification” and creates opportunities for gamers to collaborate in a form of bullet-driven democracy. Some missions in 2024 tasked players with the choice between saving one of two planets: rescuing one would reward everyone with anti-tank mines, while saving the other would protect “Super Citizen Anne’s Hospital for Very Sick Children” (with no gameplay reward attached). Players could either coordinate off-platform to focus efforts on one planet or bicker and potentially save neither. They ultimately united to save the children.

To create more moments like that, Redondo pointed out that Arrowhead aims to introduce new “chess pieces” that players can move around the metaphorical board. Some will allow them to “counteract” whatever the infamous “Joel” is plotting.

The duo did not provide specific details (Pilestedt is currently on leave from the company and has passed on Helldivers 2‘s game direction), but their goals suggest that Arrowhead’s innovative live service model still has limitless depths worth exploring—by them and by other developers as well.

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