[Pc Games] The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook

[Wolf.17]

 

Like many at PC Gamer, I've been enjoying a healthy amount of Helldiving the last two months. Whether I'm shoulders-deep in pulped bug biomass or cowering beneath a storm of automaton energy bolts, Helldivers 2 has been a refreshing surprise. I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not "unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory" good—similar to how I couldn't imagine Baldur's Gate 3 consuming the entire gaming consciousness for the tail end of last year.While Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes, they're testaments to what can be achieved through continued, devoted iteration. They're the products of development teams honing their collective craft across a decade or more. Arrowhead and Larian are studios who had the willingness—and all-too-rare freedom—to gamble on chasing a singular creative vision until the bet finally paid off, even if that sometimes meant risking bankruptcy.

 

Developing the next surprise blockbuster is an easier problem to tackle if, like Arrowhead, you've basically been refining the same game since Obama was president. Helldivers 2 was a surprise to me, but it wouldn't have been if I'd remembered that my history with Arrowhead games goes back more than a decade. Even though I'd played and loved it back in 2011, it took a casual mention from my editor to realize that, oh shit, these are the Magicka folks!

As I rotated the two very different-looking games in my mind, cubelike, their similarities crystallized. In hindsight, Magicka's DNA is visibly threaded across everything Arrowhead's made. Mid-combat key combos to combine elemental magic would evolve into the ordinance input sequences in Helldivers, producing the same slapstick carnage. Magicka's farcical fantasy was a premonition of the Helldivers sci-fi satire. And when Arrowhead drifted from the Magicka model, it was still improving its art of gratuitous multiplayer action in the firefights of Showdown Effect and co-op dungeon crawling in Gauntlet.

Helldivers 2 isn't an anomaly. It's the product of 13 years spent honing the craft of creating jolly, gratuitous meat grinders where you punch in frantic button combinations to turn your foes and friends gleefully into mulch. The camera angle changed and now it's orbital strikes instead of elemental spells, but Arrowhead's been chipping away at the same block. 

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-wild-successes-of-helldivers-2-and-baldurs-gate-3-send-a-clear-message-let-devs-cook/