HELLDIVERS 2 Could Add Eight-Player Missions and Massive Maps Instead of Making HELLDIVERS 3

Arrowhead Game Studios isn’t in a rush to move on from Helldivers 2, and that’s great news for fans who are still deep in the Galactic War. Rather than abandoning the game for a full sequel, the studio’s leadership is far more interested in pushing the current experience to new heights with what they’re calling sequel-level features.

The idea is simple. Make Helldivers 2 feel so big and ambitious that it could eventually stand shoulder to shoulder with a true sequel.

Arrowhead Game Studios has already been clear that a potential Helldivers 3 is still a long way off. The focus right now is on expanding Helldivers 2 for as long as the community wants to keep fighting.

Chief creative officer and creative director Johan Pilestedt recently opened up about what that long-term vision could look like and it goes well beyond small updates or seasonal tweaks.

Pilestedt explained that the team is actively thinking about features that normally wouldn’t show up until a sequel. As he put it, "there's quite a lot of them actually and I think the community is pretty good at picking up where they sort of want the game to head when you consider sort of the sequel-esque approach to it."

One of the most exciting ideas on the table is expanding mission size and player count. According to Pilestedt, "Eight-player missions would be one of those. Larger open-world maps where you maybe come across other Helldiver teams to then take on bigger challenges together. Operations that affect other teams, as well, would be those kind of level of features."

That kind of design would dramatically change how Helldivers 2 feels moment to moment. Running into other squads mid-operation and coordinating on the fly would push the cooperative chaos to another level.

Bigger maps also open the door for more dynamic objectives and large-scale encounters that really sell the idea of a galaxy at war.

For Pilestedt, all of this ties back to scale. Sequel-level features are anything "that really accentuates the Galactic War and the scale of the conflict that the players are in." More players, larger battlefields, and interconnected operations all serve that goal without forcing the studio to reset progress with a brand-new game.

There’s no timeline attached to any of these ideas, and none of this should be taken as confirmation that eight-player missions or massive open-world maps are officially coming, but it would be cool if they actually did do this.

What we do know is that the team is already talking through the next four major arcs for the game, which suggests Helldivers 2 still has a lot of life left in it.

Instead of rushing toward Helldivers 3, Arrowhead seems committed to letting Helldivers 2 evolve naturally. If that evolution includes features that feel big enough to be a sequel on their own, most fans would gladly stick around for the ride.