Helldivers 2 creative director holds surprise Discord Q&A, says "the criticism is valid" and "the worst thing would have been if we f**ked up and no one cared"

Former Arrowhead CEO and longtime Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt spent a good chunk of the afternoon chatting to the game's still somewhat disgruntled Discord community about weapon balance, future update ideas, and other game design bugbears. In particular, he reiterated that "weapons should feel powerful" and dug into the recent unpopular changes made to flamethrower-type weapons, bluntly saying the updated fire visual effect "looks like [Team Fortress 1]." 

Pilestedt had been inactive on Discord since May, seemingly partly due to some vacation time – he now jokes he's still got around 50 unused days of vacation – but was evidently feeling talkative while killing time at an airport post-Gamescom. "It was great talking to you all again," he said as he rushed to board a plane after a few hours of Q&A. 

Across dozens of replies, Pilestedt waded into discourse over specific weapons, fundamental design decisions, Arrowhead's testing process, the long-awaited review bomb cape, cut content trivia, and a whole lot more. Let's start with the flamethrower and fire changes that torched conversations around the Escalation of Freedom update. 

One user asked if Pilestedt was in the loop on the fire changes which were billed as a bug fix enabling more realistic behavior. "I read about it on Facebook when at a family dinner during vacation," he replied. "I understand what it aimed to do, but it was not iterated upon enough and the VFX looks like TF1."

Similarly, one user, who reckons Helldivers 2 remains a "very great game," said they'd "love to see stronger weapons but with that more enemies to balance out our new, stronger weapons." Pilestedt replied: "Yeah, agree - weapons should feel powerful - as it says on the box."

The very first thing Pilestedt said was a comment on potential collaborations with other games (Deep Rock Galactic comes to mind). While Arrowhead is "looking to do collabs," they're lower on the priority list as it's "important that we improve