Is Helldivers 2 repeating Magicka’s mistakes?

I love Magicka. It’s one of the most broken, poorly balanced games I’ve ever spent dozens of hours playing, and that’s not a joke. Arrowhead Games’ old classic actually shares a lot of DNA with Helldivers 2, and after looking into its development history, stuff’s begun to make sense.

For context, I’m basing a huge chunk of my thoughts in this article on three different sources:

• My personal experience with Arrowhead’s output (I was one of those who played The Showdown Effect)
• The community’s experiences with Helldivers 2 which is extremely hard to miss if you frequent the game’s main subreddit
• A 2011 postmortem of Magicka was posted on GameDeveloper, where the former Arrowhead CEO (and current CCO) Johan Pilestedt explained many of the team’s mistakes.

The latter is an excellent article in general, but more specifically, it’s just about all the insight you need into Arrowhead Games’ production capacities. It’s a mirror, too, of what’s going on with Helldivers 2 at this time, as the game just keeps jumping from one world-ending crisis into another without a pause.

I’m not interested in kicking Helldivers 2 while it’s down at all. I enjoy it quite a lot even today, even as a solo player, and I genuinely believe it’s going to improve at some point. If you need a bit of hope in this regard, look no further than Pilestedt’s own little Q&A that recently went up on Discord. It’s good stuff, though it obviously remains to be seen whether Arrowhead can deliver all that.

That being what it is, I feel like it might be useful for those who aren’t familiar with Magicka and Helldivers 1 to get a sense of why this game is having so many problems. Because, really, though it might feel like Arrowhead is a mostly unknown quantity from a casual, mainstream point of view, this really couldn’t be further from the truth. Quite the opposite, in fact, as the studio is seemingly repeating some of the mistakes it did with Magicka in the late aughts.

Helldivers 2 is a repeat of Magicka in some key ways, and that’s not a compliment

As I said before, you should read up on that interview with Pilestedt if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what made (and broke!) Magicka back in the day. It’s an excellent article, and I genuinely feel it will help readers understand what might be going on with Helldivers 2 in the background. Here are some pertinent facts to keep in mind if you don’t have the time to do so, though:

• Arrowhead massively underestimated the amount of work it would take to make Magicka, by a whopping 700 percent.
• Magicka was being made to be a “niche” game, which allowed Arrowhead to easily “filter and dismiss “incorrect” feedback from certain well-established people that knew the industry better.” Later on, Pilestedt admits that some of this advice had a bearing on their situation: “It was almost as if we were told about the exact position of all the mines in a minefield and we still, like some sort of imbeciles, were compelled to step on them.”
• The game’s instability wasn’t apparent until it was released on Steam, where a “huge number of people bought it the first day” and encountered “severe bugs and crashes.”
• There wasn’t a grand plan for the production of the game, leading to the release of content that shouldn’t have been pushed out: “All that existed was a timeline on the whiteboard with numbered weeks associated with levels and features. If a level slipped past the week to which it was assigned, we would just consider it “good enough” — even though it was missing crucial gameplay features.”
• Pilestedt adds that his team had a “tendency of having to experience mistakes before learning from them,” which “kept haunting [Arrowhead] throughout the entire development process.”

I’m sure you get the point by now. I’m not saying that Helldivers 2 is a scaled-up carbon copy of the problematic development of Magicka, but I am saying that the two games appear to rhyme in some key ways. What does that mean, exactly? Maybe nothing. Possibly everything. This is the same studio we’re talking about, after all, with many of the same people spearheading its production pipelines and project management.

It’s not too late to start playing Helldivers 2, not by a long shot, but Arrowhead has been burning through player goodwill at a frankly ridiculous rate. I’m wondering just how many times the CEO or CCO will need to explain themselves (again) and promise to do better, only for the next update to tank things further.

I still believe Helldivers 2 is a good game. Frankly, I still think it’s one of the best releases of the year and beyond. It’s just that it’s turned out to be a bit of a hot potato for Arrowhead, and the studio seems not to have put on its gloves yet.

Unlike Magicka, Helldivers 2 still has a chance of rising beyond its problems

As it currently stands, Magicka is kind of toast. The game is thoroughly broken and unplayable without a community patch, and there’s virtually no chance of it ever being officially fixed. There is Magicka 2, but it wasn’t made by Arrowhead at all, so it’s not relevant to my argument.

Helldivers 2, however, doesn’t have to share this fate. It seems all but obvious that Arrowhead Games and PIlestedt himself have repeated some pretty big mistakes in developing this game. The team is now struggling to keep up with the community’s demand for more content on top of having some questionable balancing choices. Both of these problems, though, can be resolved in due time.

I genuinely believe that the last couple of months have just been Helldivers 2‘s teething issues as Arrowhead scrambles to nudge itself into live-service operations mode. The game is simply too important both for Arrowhead and for Sony to keep driving it into the mud, and Pilestedt’s outlined plan for the game’s future updates is excellent.

For this to happen, though, I’m hoping that Arrowhead does end up looking back at what happened to Magicka. It’s an excellent example of what can happen to a fun, funny, and zeitgeisty game if it’s mishandled, and it really was Arrowhead’s doing at the time.